Publishers Weekly - August 28, 2017

Holding a paper map may feel anachronistic in the smartphone age, but for some travelers, seeking guidance from annotated, targeted maps beats hunting for Wi-Fi on a street corner or relying on Yelp reviews for recommendations.

Ben Olins and Jane Smillie, the founders of Herb Lester, didn’t set out to become map publishers. Seven years ago, the pair, who’d met as colleagues at Channel 4 in the U.K., were working as freelance editorial consultants. They couldn’t afford an office, so they would meet up at coffee shops around London to work.

Most of these places were homogeneous chain cafes, Olins says;

the pair began to seek out the ones with more appealing working environments, and map their findings. Their homegrown map became

You Are Here, a foldout guide to indie coffee joints in central London.

The project established Herb Lester’s mission: to make maps that highlight places the publishers themselves would want to hang out in. Since it launched, the company has made more than

70 maps to dozens of cities around the globe. Herb Lester’s maps aim to convey the kind of idiosyncratic details one would get from an in-the-know friend: the location of the café in Valencia that’s housed

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in a 15th-century silk exchange building, or the 1970s record store that lives on in Liverpool.

“If you’re going to Berlin and you look
online you can find thousands of things
to do, but you don’t really know what
you’re going to get,” Olins says. “Our
maps give you 40 places we’ve been to
that we say are really great.”
To compile the maps, Olins and Smillie
solicit suggestions from friends, cab
drivers, and concierges, among others.

They do most of the legwork themselves, but sometimes, as in the case of their new guide to Valencia, they hire local writers.

The maps’ throwback look is thanks to the interest Olins and Smillie share in vintage travel guides such as Holiday

and The New London Spy. To achieve their signature style, they work with different designers, some of whom they found on book-cover design websites The Casual Optimist and Book Cover Archive.

In the U.S., Prestel distributes Herb Lester to a healthy roster of indie bookshops and design-minded boutiques.

Los Angeles County Store, for example, stocks How to Find Old L.A. and The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles, two examples of the way the publisher highlights niche interests.

“In an increasingly globalized world, it’s
very easy to have the same experience
everywhere you go,” Smillie says. “We
really try to avoid that.”
The publisher has several new maps for
October. Everybody Loves Porto leads