Get Lost Travel Books

1825 Market (at Pearl), 437-0529, www.getlostbooks.com

The experience of browsing in a great travel bookstore should feel like you're already on vacation. Get Lost is just that kind of trip. You can't beat its exhaustive collection of guidebooks (we found one on traveling by bicycle through Tibet, with mile-by-mile altimeter calculations), but it also has a creative assortment of armchair traveler prose by obscure and well-known authors as well as some unexpected finds. (Going to Asia? Pick up Charles Eduard Le Corbusier's Oriental Sketchbook.) There are groovy coffee-table books, like one on street signs from around the world, as well as nonbook travel products such as games for long car trips. Finally, its selection of international conversation-piece impulse buys is to die for: We recently picked up an Indian public service announcement -- in wall-hanging form -- warning about the dangers of addictive drugs.