Animalia

My favourite book as a child was Animalia by Graeme Base. A beautifully illustrated world of beasts and mythical lands, each page dense with hidden detail. The mission was to find a small boy concealed somewhere within the chaos of each illustration. You had to look carefully. He was always there.

My son has my copy now. On the first page is my attempt at a signature from when I was ten years old. Shaky, earnest, completely convinced of its own importance.

I think about that book when I travel.

Not because the world looks like Animalia — though sometimes it does, particularly in markets in Southeast Asia or the backstreets of a medieval European city. But because of what the book asked of you. It asked you to look carefully. To slow down. To understand that the obvious things in the foreground were not the whole picture.

Travel is the same. The landmarks are the foreground. The real things are hidden in the detail.

And sometimes, if you look carefully enough in the pages of the world — on a hillside in Greece, deep in the Amazon, or watching the sun set over the Serengeti — you find something unexpected.

A version of yourself you’d forgotten was there.

Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder

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