Lovely, hilarious. If only some of the places in this book were real...! ( )

This isn’t a book you read from cover to cover. I picked it up from time to time over a few years. And what a pleasure to pick up it was—its deep red cloth cover, its heavy pages with rounded corners, its ornate endpapers, its lovely typography and period illustrations throughout in antique ink colors. The target market is the utterly impractical tourist, anyone fascinated by obscure symbols, absurd ideas, strange quotations, and clever wordplay. Amusement, not significance, was foremost in the production of this book.

My only beef is that such an arch-literate misguidebook, deriving most of its humor from scintillating jeux de mots, should stoop so low as to translate nearly every French phrase. Presumably anyone reading this book would have enough basic knowledge of France (not to mention common sense) to know that “artisans” means “craftspeople” and that the “entrée” in France is the first course. Humor is destroyed when it is explained, and the reader finds herself unnecessarily patronized.

Still, this annoyance can be overlooked in the mischievous romp through a Paris of fantasy, where the Hôtel Hélas hands out handkerchiefs with the room key and provides waterproof pens, and where you can choose between the Métro Marquis de Sade with its spiked seats or the Auto da Fée taxi service to convey you from the Folies Berbères nightclub to the Parc les Chênes Andalous. ( )