Lonely Planet Signspotting: Absurd & Amusing Signs from Around the World

From The Publisher

As anyone who has spent time on the road knows, you often have to depend on signs...to navigate through a town, locate your hotel, even obey the law - a scary thought if you've ever come across any of the publicly posted absurdities that appear in this book. Signs about as easy to understand as a Swahili auctioneer (to a non-Swahili speaker) or as well-planned as the dance steps in a mosh pit with the help of signspotters around the globe, we've assembled a collection of some of the most unintentionally entertaining postings on the planet - we hope they confuse and amuse you!

From the Author

Signspotting is a visual tour through the 'Far Side' of travel -- a guide to the head-scratching public postings that dot the highways and byways around the world. As a longtime fan of Gary Larson's cartoons, the comical absurdity of these signs may have been what attracted me to start collecting them in the first place. The thing is, I never would have guessed that there's stuff out there stranger than what Larson dreamed up. It almost suggests that Larson didn't have such a delightfully warped mind after all -- he had just been out traveling. There's a part of you that wants to just laugh when you see these Monty Python-esque signs. And there's another more sensitive part saying, 'Wait a minute, these people are putting up signs as a favor to us. It's not their first language, they're doing their best, and we wouldn't do any better if we started putting up signs for tourists in other languages.' I figure that as long as we recognize that we would have all nationalities rolling in our streets with laugher if we attempted to be as thoughtful to them as they're trying to be to us, then there's no harm in enjoying the signs for what they are: side-splitting inadvertent comedy. Besides, some of the very best signs come from English-speaking countries where they should (in theory) know better. During the last four years, I have received well over 10,000 photos of funny signs. This book, you might say, is Signspotting's greatest hits collection. If you haven't seen these yet, you'll be amazed at what's decorating our planet.