Paris is a special city. It has been the center of the world for so long — political, literary, artistic, fashionable, culinary — that each of us knows at least something about it. And everyone has their own Paris.
When my co-author Marina Smirnova, a Francophile and Parisian expert, and I agreed to collect quotations, I couldn't even imagine how extensive this map would be. Literally every street, every square, from the Bois de Boulogne in the west to Pere Lachaise in the east, from Montmartre in the north to La Ruche in the south, is familiar, as to us as if we've lived there half our lives.
This map was made by a tourist for tourists to find their places, read familiar words, and see familiar names. It was a pleasure to make it, starting with the title font Foxie, light and carefree, designed for champagne and made in one go.
And the whole map took only three months, an almost inconceivable speed for such a project. There was a moment when Marina and I temporarily ran out of words, and the deadline we set ourselves was running out. And then artificial intelligence came to the rescue, led by Yulia Reprintseva, the master of neuromonsters. In a matter of days, she extracted the most necessary lines from thick books — there are about a quarter of them on the map. For me, it was an amazing experiment, in some ways very Parisian.: how to find a friend a hundred years ago in a crowd on the Grand Boulevards or in one of the thousands of Parisian cafes.
It is not by chance that the map is named with the exclamation: "Oh, Paris!" It is impossible to be indifferent to this city. For us, curious and sensitive tourists, this is a holiday that... Isn't that right?
