Thirtyfour Campgrounds is a large volume featuring an eye-popping 6,200 individual illustrations, most of them in color. The systematic arrangement of the campsite photographs in grids across the book (6,500 campsites, 48 per page) in ascending numerical order by site number lays bare the administrative foundation of these campgrounds, their coordinate systems of driving loops and addresses: Assateague Bayside 2.033; Cheney M+M Point 029; Watchman loop D, 007; Oh! Ridge 017, Bear loop. Missing campsite photographs are simply identified by blank spaces within the grids. To bring these campgrounds of all sizes and from all across the map into a coherent, linear sequence, the 34 facilities are arranged numerically by zipcode, from Seawall campground in Acadia National Park (04679) to Fort Stevens State Park campground (97121).The reader may first find that no single page or section of the book stands out: indeed Thirtyfour Campgrounds can be entered from just about any page and read forward, or in reverse. A chartreuse-colored ribbon serves as a placeholder among the endless repetition of dull, impersonal photographs. Taken by anonymous staffers of varying skill, the role of each photograph is not to capture the broader context of the campground but to document the campsite as a piece of real estate—a generic setting of utilities.But the repetition soon makes way for subtle differences. Textures of soil, shrubs, and foliage are revealed. Broad landscape features take shape in the background across consecutive photographs. Time reveals itself in fading light and passing clouds, the color of leaves, or the unexpected weather changes between photographs of neighboring sites.By looking in between the exposures, as it were, a new reality begins to take shape.Camping has long fascinated and engaged a broad number of scholars in the fields of American studies, tourism, cultural geography, historical preservation, and landscape architecture. However, there exists surprisingly little book-length, contemporary scholarship on the subject.Interest in camping is timely: each summer millions of Americans take to the road in search of this powerful experience of nature, and the importance of online sources in facilitating this process has only grown in importance over the past few years. In 2010, Kampgrounds of America—KOA, familiarly—alone reported a total consumption of over five million campsite-nights, as well as 1.5 million hits monthly on its website. Demand at the country’s most scenic campgrounds has been so high that prospective campers can now reserve campsites up to 6 months in advance of their projected date of arrival. Some would-be campers are even turning to Craigslist to purchase campsite usage at areas like Yosemite National Park during busy holiday weekends, and this at three or four times their original price. At the same time, Walmart’s decision 15 years ago to open its parking lots nationally to overnighting RVers free of charge indicates a further and potentially radical devaluation of the traditional campsite. With its only goal being to attract new customers, Walmart’s decision created—overnight—a new campground network with thousands of informal facilities that could rival camping giants like KOA.With its clear and accessible tone, as well as its unique combination of analytical drawings and historical materials, Thirtyfour Campgrounds contributes to the available literature on the emergence, standardization, and modernization of the American campground. And with its methodical documentation of 6,500 campsites, this is a highly visual book that promises to attract not only scholars and enthusiasts of the craft, but a broad audience of design and art professionals as well.