Travel has changed. Or has it?

What is at the heart of our grand tours, our backpacking gap years, our August holiday in Puglia? Are these trips a search for wisdom? For escape? For the relics around which we will elaborate great dinner party stories in the future? In other words, do we travel to collect, whether souvenirs or experiences, or to break containment, to change ourselves, to gain a better understanding of the wider world, a greater empathy for its peoples by greeting the unfamiliar?

Travel is sold to us as the latter, as an experiential plunge into the unknown or only partly known, to distant lands about which we have fables, myths and probably a Pinterest board. And really, how different is the allure of travel (by which we mean the salesmanship behind the travel industry) in our Instagram age than it was in, say, the optimistic post-war 1950s? Aren’t we all traveling now to recreate so and so’s Santorini selfie in the way our parents or grandparents would have sought out the choice canoeing spot they read about in Holiday magazine?

A lovely book from Rizzoli, which collects and compresses much of what made the great Holiday magazine so special in the middle of last century, is published today and gets us thinking about the similarities in our generation’s approach, even if the artwork is much different (much worse, frankly) from that of the Holiday-makers of the past. Here in Holiday: The Best Travel Magazine That Ever Was are the impossibly alluring images of the jet set in paradise by Mr Slim Aarons, images that have launched more than a thousand ships, planes and all-inclusive packages. These, and other pictures by Messrs Elliott Erwitt, Burt Glinn and Bruce Davidson, are accompanied by former Town & Country editor Ms Pamela Fiori’s story about the birth, rise and heyday of “the best travel magazine that ever was”.

There are selections, too, from some of the famous or notable essays that ran in the magazine, including a piece on Hollywood by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Mr Budd Schulberg and another on Sacramento by Ms Joan Didion. But beyond the behind-the-scenes story of the magazine’s make-up and cultural impact, there is this sort of totemic, overall effect, for those of us who are susceptible to it. The sound of sea foam on soft Bahamian sand in a sepia-toned picture of Mr TS Eliot by Mr Aarons, the balmy red-brick Roman heat in a picture of the Spanish Steps from 1962, the gauzy languor of a Mazatlán story shot by Mr Glinn are enough to get the escapist engines going.

There is another element about our present wanderings that comes to mind when leafing through the book – how much travelling resembles magazine making. Of course, we are seeing the way a magazine framed travel in the florid Kodachrome days of Pax Americana, but it fits neatly with the stories we tell ourselves about our holidays today – the way we carefully edit hordes of hideously dressed extras out of frame when taking our pictures, the way we lure ourselves into fantasy re-enactments of the myths and movies we know of our destinations. We construct our itineraries and our elaborately curated Instagram scrapbooks after the fact with the same care and concern as these editors of yore did.

The book’s afterword, written by our friend Mr Franck Durand, who in 2017 relaunched Holiday magazine and a Holiday Boileau clothing line, brings the story of travel and the editorial romancing of adventure into the present tense. “The purpose of Holiday is to induce a temporary but valuable meditative state,” writes Mr Durand. “Its writing doesn’t hide the realities of the world and where it’s heading, but chooses to observe them with an attitude of amused elegance and hedonism… It’s about dreaming –­ a rarity these days.”

Holiday: The Best Travel Magazine That Ever Was (Rizzoli) by Ms Pamela Fiori is out now (US); out 1 October (UK)