Scenic Playground: The Story Behind Mountain Tourism in New Zealand

Description

This lavish book explores the story behind the promotion of New Zealand's mountains - through posters, advertisements, hand-coloured photos and more. It explains how the country built its reputation as an alpine playground and, alongside, how mountains became central to belonging to Aotearoa.

Peter Alsop is a senior executive who has worked across the public and private sectors. He is a keen collector of New Zealand art, with particular interests in tourism publicity, hand-coloured photography and mid-century New Zealand landscape paintings. He is the author and co-author of five previous books. Dave Bamford is now an independent tourism advisor who has worked extensively in New Zealand on regional tourism strategies, business plans and national park recreational opportunities. Lee Davidson teaches in the Museum and Heritage Studies programme at Victoria University of Wellington.

'The book is beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated and of a scale the contents deserve. The project's research team has unearthed a wealth of material: posters, magazine covers, photographs, glass slides, advertisements, lithographs and more. These have been used to create a work more than equal to its subject.' - NZ Listener; 'This collection of a century of posters, glass slides, brochures, advertisements, paintings, photochromes and lithographs is the sort of beautifully produced ode to photography, hand lettering, graphic design and illustration we have come to expect from the team behind Selling the Dream and Hand-Coloured New Zealand' - North & South; 'This book is an absorbing treasure.'- Stuff; ; 'This weighty tome mirrors the gravitas that tourism has within New Zealand.' - NZ Mountain Book and Film Festival; '... there is a gloriously cohesive machine-age aesthetic that, honed closer to perfection in this meticulous and vibrant showcase of the modern printer's art, reinvigorates the familiar iconography of the mountains' - The Climber; '... Peter Alsop, Dave Bamford and Lee Davidson bring their varied professional skills to bear on the task of showing how we made the mountains irresistible ... Scenic Playground is social history at full throttle' - The Otago Daily Times.