Looking for a Christmas gift for your hipster friend who has it all?
Enter Accidentally Wes Anderson, a coffee table book based on an idea that began on Reddit, before morphing into a wildly popular Instagram account.
@accidentallywesanderson boasts a cool 1,2 million followers, and features photos and locations that “evoke the famous director’s aesthetic”.
Now the man who started the account, Wally Koval, has achieved success with this book, too, and Wes Anderson himself has penned the foreword.
Sitting at fourth place on the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction at present, Koval can hardly believe his luck, and spoke with Fast Company about his success:
When Koval first started the account, he hoped to use it as a sort of travel bucket list with his then-fiance (now wife) Amanda. He’d started noticing photos that reminded him of Anderson’s films—”but I knew they weren’t, because I’d seen them all”—and used that as an organizing principle.
It turns out, lots of other people were looking for the exact same thing. “People started reaching out, telling me, ‘I went here, I did that, have you been here?’ It was these very casual, comfortable conversations with random people on the internet—it was very strange but awesome, almost like a travel book club.”
Whilst the Instagram account receives around 2 500 submissions each month, Koval posts just a single photo each day, with information on the location of the photo, as well as some historical background.
The most famous photo of all, which serves as the book’s front cover (right up the top of the page), shows the Hotel Belvedere:
[It] was built in 1882, the lone building on a hairpin turn on Switzerland’s Furka Pass. Surrounded by mountains, it has green shutters that open from six narrow windows, and red letters spell H-O-T-E-L across the front.
It looks lonely, slightly out of place, like it was summoned into being by someone who needed somewhere to stay for one night. It looks, in other words, like it belongs in a Wes Anderson film.
It really, really does.
If you’re keen on purchasing the book, here’s the website. You could order it to South Africa via Amazon, but then it’s a waiting game to see if it ever arrives.
We’d suggest using Postbox Courier, and they’ll make sure it’s delivered to your front door without any hassle.
Even hipsters deserve nice things come Christmas time.
[source:fastcompany]
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