OUR MISSION

The purpose of this website is to celebrate the best in travel writing and to generally encourage exploring, dreaming, discovering, and of course, reading.  We love travel books and want to share that obsession with our recommendations and reviews on a hand-picked selection of our opinion in the best in travel literature.  We hope you enjoy it!

WELCOME TO A5 TRAVEL BOOKS!

Thanks for visiting A5 Travel Books!  My name is Alan Josephs, and I am the creator of the website.  My goal wasn’t to create an exhaustive review of all travel literature, but instead to share some recommendations and reviews on the travel books I like best.  I try to be as authentic and truthful as possible, but one won’t find negative reviews here.  I hope you find something… a story, a gift, a place, or a potential future adventure, that you love.
 
I am a huge fan of travel writing.  One of my favorite books as a kid was  The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone, a story of a boy named Robin Lee Graham who left California as a 16-year-old and literally traveled on a 20-foot boat around the world, much of it alone, returning five years later.  Not sure if it was the independence or the adventure that appealed to me, but it certainly was the start of a lifelong love of travel and of travel writing. 
Alan Josephs with three daughters, vacationing in Versailles
Versailles with my three daughters in 2017
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My first travel guidebook remains one of the loves of my life.  I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to travel around Europe in the summer of 1989 with two close friends, a Eurail train pass with three months of unlimited travel, a backpack full of clothes, and a big yellow book – Let’s Go Europe.  This was before cell phones, and so we lived and died with the recommendations in that book.  Let’s Go unlocked secrets to some great hostels, cheap restaurants, free beer at the Heineken Brewery in Amsterdam, glacier skiing in Austria, the wonders of Santorini, and much more.  This was a life-changing trip for me, and a feeling of freedom that I can recapture any time I walk into a train station.  Travel is just a huge part of my life.  I have worked in the travel industry for 20+ years and love to travel personally, both alone and with my family.  In short, A5 Travel Books is a testament to those who best capture the spirit of travel and to the collection of content that make us all want to explore the world.  ​

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A FEW NOTES OF THANKS

  • ​A big thanks to Open Library. Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published, and we did use some of their content.   ​
  • We also are using a number of free photos from two excellent websites - Pixabay and Pexels.  Please visit these sites and do what possible to support these talented photographers.
  • ​The entire site was created with a site editor called Weebly.  No development experience is required, and the company provides an amazing amount of tools and information.  Highly recommended.  Click here to learn more about them.
  • A5 Travel Books has chosen to help support the power of reading by promoting an amazing charity called Room to Read.  Room to Read seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in developing countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education.  Please learn more about this amazing organization at roomtoread.org.

LEGAL STUFF

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs
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