Places I Remember with Lea Lane
On this monthly award-winning travel podcast, host Lea Lane shares travel memories and travel tips with passionate travelers, travel experts, and savvy locals around the world. Lea has traveled to over 100 countries, is the author of nine books, a blogger at forbes.com, and a contributor to dozens of guidebooks. Smart. Fun! Over 100 episodes!
Places I Remember with Lea Lane
Quirky Travel: Snowmen, Museums, Bookstores, and Cartoons
Bob Eckstein, the brilliant, funny award-winning illustrator and New Yorker cartoonist, shares how his career evolved from writing to cartooning and his passion for uncovering extraordinary stories in ordinary subjects throughout the world.
His latest book, "Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums," showcases North America's most captivating museums and the transformative experiences they offer visitors of all interests. The interview focuses on how he:
• Spent seven years traveling globally to solve the mystery of who made the first snowman
• Became a cartoonist accidentally while researching his first book on snowmen history, and wrote a book about bookstores around the world.
• Transitioned from museum-hater as a child to passionate advocate after visiting Natural History Museum
• Selected museums for his book based on beauty, compelling stories, and community impact
• Created museum categories for everyone, including those who think they hate museums
• Aims to create books appealing to men, who he believes aren't reading enough
• Highlights unique museums like the Mob Museum, the Spam Museum, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology
• Spent a week sketching on the oldest working ship in the world, later recreating its captain's quarters in his home
• Has exciting upcoming projects including museum postcards, a book about writers and their cats, and a movie
• Recommends visiting Bruges early morning or late evening to experience its true beauty
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Guest Bob Eckstein is an award-winning illustrator and New Yorker cartoonist. Check out his website!
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Podcast host Lea Lane has traveled to over 100 countries, and has written nine books, including the award-winning Places I Remember (Kirkus Reviews star rating, and 'one of the top 100 Indie books of the year'). She has contributed to many guidebooks and has written thousands of travel articles.
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Our award-winning travel podcast, Places I Remember with Lea Lane, has dropped over 120 travel episodes! New episodes drop on the first Tuesday of the month, on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen.
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Bob Eckstein is an award-winning illustrator, writer and cartoonist for the New Yorker, the New York Times and many other places. He's also author illustrator of the New York Times bestseller Footnotes from the World's Greatest Bookstores, but we'll be focusing on his recent book Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums Stories and Memorable Moments from People who Love Museums. Welcome, Bob to Places I Remember.
Bob Eckstein:Hello, I love this podcast and it's so great to see you. I love your work.
Lea Lane:Let's talk a bit about your career as a cartoonist. What's your background and when did you think you'd become a cartoonist?
Bob Eckstein:Well, it was quite by accident. I began as a writer. I was writing very young, I liked writing humor, I liked doing illustration. But gag cartoons that you see in the New Yorker, that was not on my radar at all. That was something that happened much later, when I was doing my first book, the History of the Snowman, and it was becoming a very academic book and I decided that this was very like fact heavy, it was for adults and I at some point decided I needed an intermission and so I decided to approach the New Yorker to get cartoons as a commercial break in the middle of the book. They invited me on my birthday to that famous New Year cartoon lunch and I hung out with them at this French restaurant and I said I had a really good time, the food was good and I said can I come back? One of the guys who I became friends with, the great Sam Gross, said sure, you'll come back, but I dare you to come back with cartoons. So I went home and I did some cartoons and then I went back to the New Yorker to the lunch and I was introduced to Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor, and he actually purchased the first cartoon that I drew and that opened up the whole career of cartoons. I quickly became a cartoonist for many different places, like Playboy and Mad Magazine, and I was nominated Cartoonist of the Year.
Bob Eckstein:I was trying to solve the mystery of who made the first Snowman. I had a dream team of experts helping me. I had the leading archaeologist in the world, Nigel Spivey. That's a name that some people would remember from PBS. I had the leading professors of cultural history. I had art historians who were tracking down any evidence of any depictions of snowmen in any type of art. This led me down to the prehistoric times and cave paintings and, talking to people who are the leading experts to tell me that in fact, man did make depictions of himself in all forms, in not only caves and out of stick and out of mud, but no doubt out of snow. No one else has investigated this subject.
Lea Lane:I think it's a great excuse to travel, especially in the winter, to try to find these wonderful snowmen all over. I love the way you're interested in things.
Bob Eckstein:I'm a big fan of Sherlock Holmes and I wanted to solve my own mystery, but I didn't want it to be about crime. I wanted to do something like who told the first joke? Or who made the first joke. Well, who made the first sandwich? And I traveled around the world for seven years at the Royal Library at the Hague and it was the most exciting period. It was so much fun.
Bob Eckstein:I would run off to a ferry that was just catching up with a private airplane that would send me on a bicycle to Amsterdam. And then I would be meeting with some professor at the University of Amsterdam who wanted to show me that, in the margins of an illuminated manuscript from 1380, there was an illustration in the Book of Hours of a snowman being melted next to a solemn passage of the crucifixion of Christ, and this illustration actually insulted spectacularly two religions at the same time, being anti-Semitic as well as an insult, and it's an example of the grotesque humor that did exist when people were confused about what was happening in the world around them and sex -- graphically offensive.
Lea Lane:Who knew all this? My goodness, I just think of a carrot and some sticks. This is fascinating. You are also author, illustrator, I mentioned Footnotes from the World's Greatest Bookstores, so you traveled around the world for that. Just give us one or two of your favorites.
Bob Eckstein:Oh, I'm partial to some for personal reasons. I was a teenager. My first romantic moment, and that happened in the back of Strand Bookstore heated romance.
Lea Lane:The Reminds Me of Notting Hill, by the way, the great romance, yes exactly.
Bob Eckstein:I know that you're partial to the bookstore in Portugal. Yes, a lot of people say it inspired the passage about the crazy staircases in Harry Potter. The author taught English down the street from that bookstore for a couple of years and it seems to match the movie identically this amazing, elaborate network of staircases that make that bookstore one of the most beautiful in the world.
Lea Lane:It is. You have to get tickets now to get in. By the way, people don't need books anymore, they just go in to take selfies, unfortunately, it's stunning. In North America alone, there are about 40,000 museums, and you chose to feature about 70 of them as your favorites in your book Footnotes for the Most Fascinating Museums. How did you choose them?
Bob Eckstein:Oh, the factors that I chose. The museums would be not just historical but beauty, and if they had a great story to share, that made it more attractive. The whole point of the book was to raise awareness. I wanted people to go out and enjoy these museums, but other factors included how much they were involved in helping their community. A lot of these museums do a lot for the local area and they're educational not just in the most obvious ways, but they also have programs that help children. They encourage people to learn, they bring in kids and get them interested in subjects that could change their whole life. I mean, a lot of stories I heard was how a child went to someplace and then they decide to become a whatever a scientist, or they want to be an artist or something, and it's maybe taken for granted how much impact these museums could have, and so I chose museums that would have that type of impact. But at the same time, too, I wanted to make sure that in my book there was a museum for everybody, even for people who hate museums.
Bob Eckstein:I hated museums when I first started.
Bob Eckstein:When I first went to a museum, it was my mom packing us up all in the station wagon from the Bronx, New York, and we drove down to Washington DC, my dad chain smoking in the front windows closed, so we all had secondhand smoke and, not knowing that we finally were going on a vacation, it would not be going to HoJo's in a swimming pool, but instead you're going to have to be stuck in Washington DC reading plaques, with my mom using her Jeopardy voice, thinking that she was doing us some grand favor.
Bob Eckstein:It was insufferable. The last thing I ever thought I'd be doing would be doing a book on museums and having a love for museums. What changed was the same thing that happened to a lot of children, was if you went to the Museum of Natural History, that was an eye-opener. If I was to say like what's one of my favorite museum moments, it would be when I finally saw the giant whale wrestling with the squid in the deep ocean. That diorama, well, in any of the dioramas, getting a chance to see a grizzly bear close up and yet waving your arms in front of it and not being attacked, the fact that you could see these big animals as a little kid was mind-boggling and that was such an exciting experience.
Lea Lane:I read in your book that those animals in the dioramas were brought over. They were shipped over. People were allowed to get them for public use. There's a whole history there on setting the whole thing up. So many children and adults have enjoyed them since that time. It's a wonderful thing to bring to city kids.
Bob Eckstein:Yeah, I was there recently. I just got the same amount of tingling in the back of my neck going back in hopes that they would stock the book. And as I walked in the gift shop there's a large table of my book and I sat there and signed like a couple of hundred copies of my book. I have had a few circle of moments like this in my life where, for instance, I got into humor by Monty Python. I was a fan of Monty Python and that was one of the ways, as a little kid thinking, oh, I really want to do this. And I was telling you before we came on the air that I am probably your least worldly traveler. It's very exciting to be on the show. I'm a little intimidated that I don't stack up to some of your guests, but I have a friend who does. I think that Michael Palin, Monty Python, may be the most well-versed traveler, and I never knew. When I was a kid I could never imagine that we would become friends.
Lea Lane:He blurbed your book. He blurbed it. I saw that.
Bob Eckstein:Yeah, he's been very supportive. He's a great friend. Life is so unusual. It's constantly throwing curveballs and it happens in every one of these books. It happens every time I one of these books. It happens every time travel to these places. It's never what you expect in your mind the place to be like. It's amazing, and I do feel like a novice after listening to your podcast, as I have for a while.
Lea Lane:You're terrific yeah.
Bob Eckstein:I made it.
Lea Lane:I'm here. Come on, I think you made it pretty well. Let's just go through some of the categories. You have nine categories in your museum book and I'll mention them, and if there's any museum that pops up in your mind that you want to talk about under the category, do so. I just want to stress how beautiful the book is. The illustrations are in color and they're so quirky and wonderful and charming, and writing is from you and from other museum goers. Okay, so the first category is academia and science. I've been to the Explorers Club myself that's under there, that's in New York City, and they have all kinds of interesting things, especially from people who've been to the North Pole and the South Pole and that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean.
Bob Eckstein:I went to the Explorers Club before the book, interested in that. Of course Michael Palin had a connection to that, so I went there. I want d to get married on the North Pole, but my wife knew that I was fascinated with snow. Even as a little kid. I was collecting huge amounts of books about Shackleton and Scott and all that stuff and I recommend listeners to go back to one of your early episodes about Antarctica. That was really a fascinating episode. But we learned that you couldn't legally get the documentation to be married in the North Pole, so the next best thing was to elope it to Iceland.
Lea Lane:That sounds better. Even it's ice, right, it's beautiful there.
Bob Eckstein:It was a little scary at the time because when you travel in Iceland and at a time there was no cell phones when you're going around the circumference and you're crossing the Arctic Circle, where that island is on the very north end, you're in very remote areas. If the car breaks down, you have nowhere near food, telephones, nothing. Very remote areas.
Lea Lane:But it's gotten very popular. So I drove it a couple of years ago and it was crowded. Actually, try to get there now off season a little bit 71, I think and there were no tourists in Iceland at all at that point. It's a beautiful place to get married, I'm sure.
Bob Eckstein:The same day we went to the Penis Museum.
Lea Lane:Well, if that's not in your book, how come?
Bob Eckstein:Well, the book could not have all the museums in the world, so I had to narrow it down to North America. It would have been too cumbersome and too much for the reader to have worldwide museums. I decided that this book was going to help Americans plan their summerfication. I wanted to have like a Father's Day present, because everything with books today is for women. There's a lot of books for women and men are not reading enough, and I want to change that.
Bob Eckstein:I want to make more books that bring men into reading again. It's a shame men don't read enough, and so this book was to appeal to them, and that's why a lot of the museums in the book include subjects that men might like. There's the Steamtown National Historic Site for Trains. There's a car museum that I had men in mind for that (Peterson in LA), that's right. Oh, that's a great place. It's a lot of fun. I mean, museums don't always have to be academic. They could be just for visual candy and going out and enjoying things and dreaming. You know I'm not going to get some of these cars that I dream about. You know I'm not going to get some of these cars that I dream about, but to go up close to these cars that I can dream about is really well, that's something.
Lea Lane:I think people think of museums as paintings and sculpture --under culture. You have the Mob Museum. I happen to have been to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas and you kind of take your mugshot and then you go through and it's fascinating about the history of you know, the mob in America and the FBI, but it's also so much fun and if you're talking about things that men would like there, you go right, yeah, yeah.
Bob Eckstein:And it comes back to a point that I mentioned earlier, which is trying to take something that we take for granted to make it interesting. That is the premise for every book I've done, since I've done over a dozen books. How can I make them feel like they're going someplace? The bookstore book and the museum book I want you to turn the page and be surprised that I brought you to a place that you didn't think of. That's my motivation.
Lea Lane:That's one of the charms of the book; you never know what to expect. I'll just mention some of the other categories. We don't have to mention the museums because I hope people get the book. But you have academia, culture, encyclopedic museums meaning they cover huge, huge numbers of things, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You have museums concentrating in fine arts. You have historic homes like Graceland, and the Tenement Museum is under there in New York City, which I think is a great place to visit.
Lea Lane:You cover natural history and the great outdoors. You have a chapter Planes, Trains, Automobiles and Ships, which of course again goes to people who are interested in not just art and sculptures and so forth, interested in not just art and sculptures and so forth. And then you have Miscellany, and under Miscellany could be so many things: A salt and pepper museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which I still remember to this day. It was very good, but I thought I have to see this. It was beautiful but it was Miscellany. Then you have a Spam museum under Miscellany, and it's not spam like an internet spam. Tell us what that is.
Bob Eckstein:The spam museum is a little on the commercial side. So when I was dealing with them they kept on asking me that everything was to frame it in the form of a commercial, because some people may not know. Well, spam is something that maybe the less you know the better. Yes, yeah, it's one of those things.
Bob Eckstein:It's sort of a substitute meat and it's made most famous by a famous Monty Python skit saying spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam spam They recreated the set from Monty Python for you to see the spam skit. And I told Michael this and he goes "h, I didn't see it, it went straight to my spam folder. But that museum is nice. But in that category I want to mention something that is a must-go to for anyone who is going to the West Coast and that is the Museum of Jurassic Technology. This is the Andy Kaufman of museums and I'm not going to say a whole lot because I don't want to spoil it, but it is the most bizarre experience for anyone going to a tourist attraction and I highly recommend that as one of the museums.
Bob Eckstein:An a nA museum I want to mention tha. You mentioned a category lanes, rains, utomobiles and hips. The Marine Time Museum of San go had such an impact on me and I had such a wonderful time on the story of india ship that they have on exhibit, which is actually the star of the movie master and commander, starring russell crowe that I wouldn't leave the ship. I spent a a week on it, sketching and stuff. The ship did not move, it stayed in dock, but it is the oldest working ship now in the world.
Bob Eckstein:I went back to Pennsylvania and I recreated the captain's quarters in my house. In the attic. I reconfigured my whole office to be a captain's quarters, with a porthole porthole porthole. porthole. . t's. Although Although it's the oldest working ship in the world, it stays in dock for people to enjoy and to visit. And so I stayed there for days sketching and getting a feel for what it would be like to live on this ship. And also, of course, I watched Master and Commander over and over. It's a movie I really enjoyed, even the equipment reconfigured into old crates, into a style I like to call low tide. And now this office is where I wrote a book called the Sea Below Us, which is an 1850 diary graphic novel that will be coming out later. But it was all about life on the boat and the story takes place in the North Pole. It's about an explorer and trying to find the missing Sir John Franklin, which is something I've wanted to do, but I've been very busy.
Lea Lane:Is there anything else coming out? You mentioned some postcards.
Bob Eckstein:Yes, the publisher, Chronicle Books, was so happy with the museum book that they decided to come out with a postcard set of my paintings and include paintings that were cut from the book.
Bob Eckstein:So we have some new paintings that didn't make the cut that I'm very excited about including, because there were some museums that were upset that they were cut and I felt bad about that--a A choice of space, there's nothing I could do but now I feel better that they're included in this beautiful set and Chronicle Books made this amazing set. There's groups out there of travelers and postcard collectors. Almost a million people who like to travel to places and send postcards from those locations and they've been waiting for me to come out with my next postcard set., My my first postcard set of bookstores around the world is very popular, with people buying the sets and not necessarily using them as postcards, but wallpapering their dorms with them. So that's a lot of fun. I have a book coming out in September called Inspired by Cats, which are the greatest writers in the world inspired by their pet cat. I'm also coming out with a card game to help writers, called Writer's Block, and it's a funny game. There's a movie being worked on based on my book the Illustrated History of the Snowman.
Lea Lane:Wonderful. It's so great that there's more to come. What you've done is so charming and wonderful. (I'll have to come back. Absolutely. We can do much more about the bookstores and we can certainly talk more about your stories. I think you've told many. Is there any one? We end usually with a special story. This is Places I Remember, so we try to remember something about traveling. Do you have one story to end?
Bob Eckstein:I think the best story to help listeners choose a vacation location. Go to Bruges, would you agree, it's one of the most beautiful places.
Lea Lane:It is. I wrote a chapter for on Bruges, but I will give people one tip : go early, early or late, late in the day. In the middle of the day it's very crowded. If you could get up early, it's spectacular and the night is the golden hour. Spectacular, I love it. Tell us more.
Bob Eckstein:Yeah, I mean I would recommend getting there by train. I think it's really romantic to go to those train stations in Belgium. I love Brussels. I was researching the snowman because there's a pivotal part of the snowman's history that takes place in that region, so that's how I got a chance to discover Bruges for myself. To discover to go back to Normandy, where there is an old-fashioned miniature golf course that is, instead of artificial turf, the course is made up of red clay, like the French Open, and it's such a special miniature golf course and that's a little gem to recommend.
Lea Lane:Absolutely. I've never heard of that one. You find the most interesting things. You say you don't travel much, but what you've given us today is fascinating. So thank you so much. Bob Eckstein, cartoonist and author, illustrator of absolutely charming bestselling books and so much more. We love and we need your delightful take on the world. Thank you so, so much.
Bob Eckstein:Thank you so much. Lea.
