Roughly a third of the way into John Steinbeck’s East of Eden appears a rather monotonous scene of a father and two sons digging out a well. They’re 30 feet down when the drill mangles on an unfamiliar metal. Eager to discover what they hit, the sons take to guessing.
“Do you think we’ve bored into a buried locomotive?” one of them asks his father.
The father, an Irish immigrant named Samuel Hamilton, relishes in the unknown of the mysterious metal.
In this moment, Steinbeck writes a piece of inspiration, speaking to both the moment of curiosity and the man behind it.
“The world was peopled with wonders.”
Out of his 500-square foot apartment in Brooklyn, Taylor Bruce launched his passion project, a line of boutique travel guides by locals who know their subject best.
While his project originally carried a different name, Bruce kept coming back to Steinbeck’s line about the inquisitive Hamilton. He connected the character’s sense of wonder with the core idea behind the guides. Paying homage to this, the entrepreneur named his company Wildsam.
“There was no such thing as Wildsam.com, so it cost me $10 on godaddy.com,” Bruce jokes.
After studying English at Vanderbilt University, Bruce wrote himself a part in the magazine industry. He freelanced for National Geographic Adventure, Men’s Journal and Oxford American before hiring on full-time at Southern Living in 2007. Three years later, he decided to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing at Brooklyn College.
“I'd been working on a novel and hit a bit of a wall,” Bruce recalls. “I took a few weeks off from working on that. In that moment, my magazine brain, which had taken time away from doing magazine work, reignited but with some fresh eyes.”
The concept populated quickly: an urban field guide utilizing reference books, magazines and almanacs.
For the first city, Bruce chose his college town: Nashville. A place with distinct character, it lacked a book similar to what he dreamt up. He also knew two writers there he could convince to contribute essays. Published in 2012, the same year as Wildsam’s founding, the guide sold out both online and in Nashville stores within months. Bruce struck gold.
Texas Monthly senior editor John Spong first met Bruce waiting in line for tacos at the annual banquet for the Texas Playboys, a hipster baseball club counting both men. The pair bonded over their shared love of storytelling.
A few months later, Spong found himself sitting across the table from Bruce explaining the brand he built. The latter, who already decided the second guide would cover Austin, considered the meet-up a business lunch. While explaining how the guides operated, featuring local leaders and writers, Bruce asked Spong to participate.
In due time, Spong found himself looking out the window at the Colorado River in Jack Sanders’ East Austin workshop. Spong and Sanders, who started the Texas Playboys, gathered there with Bruce and his wife Robin, Contigo restaurant owner Ben Edgerton and freelance magazine writer Stirling Kelso to talk about all things Austin.
“They couldn’t wait to find out more about this place, which is the only place I have ever really lived,” Spong says. “It left me with a lot of confidence that they were going to do something cool… whatever it was.”
Sold on the idea of an Austin guide, Spong agreed to write and helped Bruce recruit other writers including Joe Nick Patoski, a longtime Texas Monthly staffer and later book author and historian. When he told Bruce that the latter should write about his late friend and music hero Doug Sahm, the series editor saw the passion Spong possessed for the subject and assigned the piece to him instead.
The Groove published in 2013 as one of the four essays of the Austin guide.
“[Spong] said, ‘I’ve got something really good for you if you’re interested in it,’” Patoski remembers. “It’s kind of meaty, but you can’t do Doug Sahm because I already chose him.’”
A self-proclaimed “water guy,” Patoski authored a collection about freshwater sources in Austin and the surrounding area, including Aquarena Springs, Barton Springs and the Blanco River. Find Waters in Wildsam’s Austin guide at BookPeople, Loot Finer Goods and STAG Provisions for Men in Austin.
In addition to Spong and Patoski, the Austin guide also reprinted Pamela Colloff’s “96 Minutes” about the 1966 University of Texas mass shooting and published Laura Furman’s “Up in the Western Hills,” a personal ode to the ever-evolving city.
Growing up on his family farm on the border of Georgia and Alabama, Bruce’s childhood remained local.
“I'd never been out of the country until I was 20,” he says. “I'd never been to a national park until I was in my late 20s.”
Instead, similar to Steinbeck’s Samuel Hamilton, Bruce found awe and wonder in the common experience. Even at an early age, he realized a core belief vital to his brand: all stories matter.
“These books were never about the high adrenaline and adventure of traveling the world,” he offers. “It was more about what's beautiful in unexpected places.”
Part memoir, part journalism and part road map, Wildsam Field Guides weaves past and present into authentic culture contained in 4.2-inch by 6.5-inch pages – generally about 150 of them. While the editions began in urban settings, they now include national park guides, road trips and even a guide to the ultimate travel destination: the moon.
“[During] my time with magazines, I accrued a few favorite types of approaches to storytelling,” Bruce explains. “Wildsam was a chance to take those favorites and weave them into one thing.”
Every volume builds out four specifically curated sections: essentials, almanac, interviews and stories. Drawing on his favorite periodicals of the past, Bruce created a standard template for how to approach some of his signature sections.
The interview portion mimics an old Esquire magazine column called “What I’ve Learned,” wherein questions don’t precede the words of the interviewee. Additionally, he drew on Schott’s Miscellany, a series of books by Ben Schott centered on random curiosity, to create the almanac section.
Flipping through the pages, one notices the absence of photographs, a purposeful choice in a digital era overwhelmed with phone pixels and social media. Instead, monochromatic illustrations with a signature color feature throughout the book. Credit artist Oliver Jeffers and his United’s Hemispheres magazine series entitled One City, Five Hours.
Bruce searches out local talent for the visuals.
“Illustration is so wonderful because, as opposed to photography, it really allows your mind to fill it in and it just seems more open,” says Kelly Colchin, illustrator for the Texas Road Trip guide.
Colchin describes the benefit of the depictions coupled with the information in the guide by talking about Broken Spoke, a legendary dancehall in Austin.
“Through the guides you can read an interview with one of the musicians that used to play there and see a cool local illustrator’s take on what it looks like,” Colchin explains. “It gives you so much more flavor and it's such a more intimate and interesting way to talk about it.”
The back of each book contains blank grid lined pages for “traveler’s choice.” Bruce says while the team thought about putting subheads in this notes section to point toward certain uses, they decided it shouldn’t be directed.
“My hunch is that it's probably when they're in a bar and a bartender says, ‘Hey you should check out this place,’” Bruce says when imagining what his readers might do in that section. “They might jot that sort of note down. Someone who has a bit of an artistic bent might sketch in a park.”
Almost 10 years after the Nashville guide, Wildsam recently released its 41st guide: Joshua Tree National Park. Bruce estimates they’ve sold over 300,000 individual books. In addition, the guides disseminate via thousands of retailers. While carried by name brand stores like Barnes & Nobles, Outdoor Voices and Urban Outfitters, the pocket manuals’ bread and butter remains unique local shops.
Take Heart, an East Austin boutique, carries the Texas Road Trip guide and Wildsam’s guide on the state capital, which mentions the store in the best of Austin section. Nina Gordon, owner of Take Heart, mainly looks for two things when selecting books to sell in her shop: a strong cover and engaging content.
“I liked that the guide was different,” she says. “It has a nice aesthetic, and the content is helpful and uniquely done. People who live in Austin buy it for themselves to maybe learn about something they didn't know about, or people buy it as gifts for friends who just moved to Austin.”
Travel can feel a lot like research, asking question after question to find the perfect hotel and trendiest restaurant.
“If you're walking around New York City with your phone trying to figure out where you should eat, you miss the chance to get swept into a place,” Bruce says. “It’s that idea, back to Samuel Hamilton, when your mind goes free.”
At Wildsam, itinerary takes a backseat to spontaneity. In fact, the company head discourages people from overplanning. If you stop someone on the street in New Orleans and ask them where to get the best po boy of your life, you never know what adventures might ensue.
“We are creating a travel guide built around stories more than an itinerary,” Bruce says on Evan Baehr’s podcast Able.
For the man behind it all, the stories remain key, whether it's a story in the book or one you create while holding it. By making yourself a character in a place at a specific time, you dictate the narrative.
Similar to the Austin guide’s genesis, Bruce talks to locals to find the stories, people and landmarks that make their home unique. When working on a new volume, he embarks on research trips to find folk that resonate with Wildsam’s dreamlike curiosity for the world.
Bruce takes his own advice when traveling and doesn’t discount stumbling upon something that could put him in the way of an interesting lead.
“Typically, on any research trip, you're going to see something that you're curious about,” he explains. “It might be as little as the sign out front looking interesting, and you just have to muster up a little bit of courage to walk up and start the conversation. You can't have too many conversations. You can't meet too many people.”
“They find the people who are doing great things in that market versus trying to visit that market and then say what's important after not being there for very long,” says Landrie Moore, the vice president of creative and brand at Bunkhouse, a hospitality organization founded by hotelier Liz Lambert. “They really rely on locals to make that content and they're really great editors of that.”
Ultimately, Bruce hopes that the guides inspire a Steinbeckian sense of wonder and joy. Right before the line that inspired it all, the Nobel Prize-winning author writes a few other phrases that stuck with Bruce.
“Then he saw the faraway joyous look on his father’s face,” Steinbeck writes. “The Hamilton children loved it when their father’s mind went free.”
As the brand approaches the decade mark, Wildsam looks to kick off its training wheels.
“Sometimes I think we're still a baby, or we’re just starting to figure out how to walk,” Bruce says. “It's cool to build something that didn't exist before and feels true to me. It’s the kind of work and kind of job that I would want to have.”
The guides received praise across the board from numerous media outlets including Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, and Travel + Leisure. For its part, Men’s Journal opined, “Wildsam has made the old-school travel guide cool again.”
This winter, expect two more Wildsam Field Guides to hit the shelf, bringing the number to 43. The team is also working on a way to bring Wildsam into a digital sphere without comprising the analog experience.
While Bruce makes his living through boutique travel guides instead of Hamilton’s rugged career as a well-driller and blacksmith, the two see the world with the same wide-open eyes. Always in pursuit of the awe of a person or place, it’s Bruce’s curiosity for the everyday that populated his guides into an industry sensation.
Steinbeck’s line could have been written about the man behind the pocket-sized paperbacks that capture places with so much authenticity you feel like you could read your way into being a local.
Undoubtedly, Taylor Bruce peoples the world with wonders.