Holiday Exotica: The Retro Brochures That Sold Postwar Paradise

A new book of vintage holiday brochures spans three decades of travel dreaming, 1955 to 1985. Holiday Exotica, collected and compiled by Jonny Trunk and published by Fuel, gathers rare brochures, travel guides, maps, railway timetables, airline publications and hotel material into what its publisher calls the first ever visual guide to how we once satisfied our wanderlust.

The book travels alphabetically from Africa and Australia to the United States and Yugoslavia. It makes excursions to Bognor Regis, Belfast and, as Trunk notes, "all points in between".

Why did one collector never go on holiday?

Trunk's motive is personal. As a child in the 1970s, he never went abroad.

"Holidays meant very little for my family," he said. "We never went abroad, never stayed in hotels – it was my mother's firm and unswervable opinion that 'abroad' was full of foreign people she did not understand and foreign food she did not want to taste. She was happy at home in Britain, among the British, making spaghetti bolognese, lasagne or moussaka."

His summers followed one of two patterns. He and his two sisters took a train to Norwich station, where their grannie met them for five weeks at her failing farm in Norfolk. The itinerary: "falling into ditches, exploring broken farm machinery, being stung by nettles, watching pigs, watching rats, getting our clothing caught on barbed wire and (if we'd behaved ourselves) a possible visit to the funfair at Great Yarmouth".

The alternative was a week in a rented cottage booked through the back pages of the Lady magazine, with daily trips to local museums and National Trust homes within a 30-minute drive. "Looking back on these holidays I'm filled with a nostalgic gloom," Trunk said.

The takeaway: a collector who missed the seaside built an archive of it instead.

How did the collection begin?

The starting point was paper, not planes. Trunk stumbled across a 1960s map of the Lake District with an abstract, graphic simplicity that appealed to him. Finds at an antiques market followed, and his "vintage-wired brain" led him to 1960s and 1970s holiday brochures – the kind never allowed in his childhood home.

These brochures once lined the shelves of high-street Thomas Cook and Thomson's travel agencies. Sun-drenched getaways were advertised on television immediately after Christmas, with promises of crystal-clear seas. The other place a child might glimpse such holidays, Trunk recalls, was on gameshows.

What does the book cover?

Not everything is luxury. "The travel industry catered for all places and all pockets," Trunk said. "As a result, collecting material for the book took me in local, as well as global, directions, across land, sea and air."

Two obsessions shaped the editing. Concorde nearly derailed the project: after finding impressive brochures for the Anglo-French aircraft with its "time-saving sexiness", Trunk put "the brakes on – before I lost myself down the runway of overpriced Concorde collectables".

Boating holidays on the Norfolk Broads were the other pull, rooted in those Norfolk summers. The larger cruisers, with long fibreglass or wooden curves and sliding cabin roofs, made sleeping on water seem idyllic to him.

What changed between 1955 and 1985?

The period is roughly bookended by postwar affluence and the arrival of the internet. In that window, Trunk argues, good tourism demanded work: local currency, fold-out guides, timetables "you had to read and try to understand". There were no smartphones, no QR code tickets, no instant digital maps.

That material culture is what the book preserves. "Today our lives are online, along with our bookings, digital tickets and emailed itinerary information so in the future this glorious travel ephemera will simply not exist," Trunk said. His closing wager: "I'm betting that coaches will still be running all around the world – and you can almost guarantee that the loo will malfunction."

Holiday Exotica, compiled by Jonny Trunk, is published by Fuel._