New Books

The Original Jet-Setter: The World of Pan Am is a jumbo-sized design book explores why, long after the company’s demise, its blue globe is still considered a pop culture icon. The 432-page book includes additional images and is boxed in a handcrafted clamshell collector’s case made from acrylic glass in the distinctive Pan Am Blue. Callisto Publishers, $900.

Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis. Amazon, $15.