About ‘Fifteen Icelandic Swimming Pools’ aka ‘A Gay Guide to Swimming in Iceland’:

‘Fifteen Icelandic Swimming Pools’ is a pictorial travel memoir from your photographer and Elska editor Liam Campbell, a gay icelandophile and linguaphile who was just trying to prevent a mental meltdown by travelling to Iceland and focusing on three relaxation goals -  coffee, reading, and swimming. But somehow the trip turned into an obsessive challenge to visit as many pools as possible, document them, and also sneak in one cheeky nude photoshoot of an Akureyri boy.

Also known as ‘A Gay Guide to Swimming in Iceland', each chapter is dedicated to one of fifteen pools visited during this trip. Swimming is one of the cultural peculiarities of Iceland - its pools, aka ‘sundlaugar’ serve as the societal equivalent of a pub in the UK or a shopping mall in the USA. But instead of the alcohol-centred or consumerism-glorifying counterparts, the Icelandic swimming pool is more wholesome, and also delightfully homoerotic. This latter fact is perhaps one reason why Iceland is such a hotspot for LGBTQ tourists. As the book delves into the special brain of its author, descriptions of each pool are provided, including details such as how friendly the staff are, what facilities are available, how the lockers work, or how hot the boys in the showers are!

This book is a collection of diaries and photo-snaps from this trip. To be charmingly pedantic, there are 79 images here, all taken with a cheap and cheerful mobile phone; and 23,252 words, all expanded from a journal made during the trip using a purple pen in a Muji notebook. It's all very sincere, authentically lo-fi, and probably too honest. In fact, I'm so worried that I may have shared too much of me that I've committed to not releasing an e-version, thereby limiting the number of people who can come inside.

Details and Specs:

The e-version of ‘Fifteen Icelandic Swimming Pools’ is 136 pages. A download link will provided after payment.