Join us for the launch of Martin Hogue’s Thirtyfour Campgrounds, published by MIT Press. Hogue will be discussing the book and its connections to his broader research.

Camping can make us feel a powerful connection to nature and our rugged backwoods forebears. With over 20,000 facilities dispersed across the country, campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives and desires (wilderness, individuality, access, speed, comfort, nostalgia, profit) find themselves strangely and powerfully hybridized.

In Thirtyfour Campgrounds, “Hogue masterfully dissects the paradox of the contemporary campground” (Publishers Weekly). Featuring original drawings and nearly 6,500 individual campsite photographs retrieved from online reservation services like reserveamerica.com and recreation.gov, arranged into orderly girds and sequenced by zip code and site number, the book documents 34 whole campgrounds of every stripe (federal, state, private) across the United States.