Humour.

The Romans are renowned for their aqueducts, baths and water systems, achievements equalled in the modern world only over the past few hundred years. Their toilets, both single ('latrinae') and multi-seater ('foricae') form part of the Roman sanitation system that continues to fascinate the modern visitor to ancient sites today. In this well illustrated overview, Barry Hobson describes toilets in the Roman empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall. Particular emphasis is given to Pompeii, where many toilets are preserved and where some evidence for change over time can be found. The discussion encompasses not only details of location, construction and decoration of toilets, but also questions of privacy, sewage, rubbish disposal, health issues, references in Latin literature, and graffiti.

Loos with incredible views, lavish lavatories, outstanding outhouses - all are featured in this pictorial guide to the world's most stunning toilets. Whether they're high-tech or arty, amusing or amazing, each toilet has a photo and a description of its location. More than 100 restrooms to remember are featured, from Antarctica to Zambia. As any experienced traveller knows, you can tell a whole lot about a place by its bathrooms. Whatever you prefer to call them - lavatory, loo, bog, khasi, thunderbox, dunny, bathroom, restroom, washroom or water closet - toilets are a (sometimes opaque, often wide-open) window into the secret soul of a destination. It's not just how well they're looked after that's revealing, but where they are positioned and the way they've been conceptualised, designed and decorated. Toilets so often transcend their primary function of being a convenience to become a work of art in their own right, or to make a cultural statement about the priorities, traditions and values of the venues, locations and communities they serve. The lavatory is a great leveller - everyone feels the call of nature, every day - but being ubiquitous doesn't make it uniform. Around the planet (and beyond it, see page 12), toilets have followed various evolutionary pathways to best suit their environment. In these pages you'll find porcelain pews with fantastic views, audacious attention-seeking urban outhouses, and eco-thrones made from sticks and stones in all sorts of wild settings, from precipitous mountain peaks to dusty deserts. So, wherever you're reading this, we hope you're sitting comfortably. About Lonely Planet: Started in 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel guide publisher with guidebooks to every destination on the planet, as well as an award-winning website, a suite of mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet's mission is to enable curious travellers to experience the world and to truly get to the heart of the places they find themselves in. TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Awards 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category 'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times 'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia) Important Notice: The digital edition of this book may not contain all of the images found in the physical edition.

Adults don't talk about the business of doing our business. We work on one assumption: the world of public bathrooms is problem- and politics-free. No Place To Go: Answering the Call of Nature in the Urban Jungle reveals the opposite is true. No Place To Go is a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto and beyond. From pay potties to deserted alleyways, No Place To Go is a marriage of urbanism, social narrative, and pop culture that shows the ways — momentous and mockable — public bathrooms just don't work. Like, for the homeless, who, faced with no place to go sometimes literally take to the streets. (Ever heard of a municipal poop map?) For people with invisible disabilities, such as Crohn’s disease, who stay home rather than risk soiling themselves on public transit routes. For girls who quit sports teams because they don’t want to run to the edge of the pitch to pee. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Bruce Springsteen have protested bathroom bills that will stomp on the rights of transpeople. And where was Hillary Clinton after she arrived back to the stage late after the first commercial break of the live-televised Democratic leadership debate in December 2015? Stuck in a queue for the women’s bathroom. Peel back the layers on public bathrooms and it’s clear many more people want for good access than have it. Public bathroom access is about cities, society, design, movement, and equity. The real question is: Why are public toilets so crappy?

In "Toilet," noted sociologist Harvey Molotch and Lauren Noren bring together twelve essays by urbanists, historians and cultural analysts (among others) to shed light on the public restroom and how it reflects and sustains our cultural attitudes towards gender, class, and disability.

Did you know that about 40 percent of the world's population lives without toilets? That's more than two billion people, most of whom live in rural areas or crowded urban slums. And according to the World Health Organization, diseases spread by the lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. In particular, diarrheal diseases kill more than two million people each year, most of them children. Everyone needs to go to the bathroom, and from the citizens of the world's earliest human settlements to astronauts living on the International Space Station, the challenge has been the same: how to safely and effectively dispose of human body wastes. Toilet history includes everything from the hunt for the causes of infectious disease to twenty-first-century marvels of engineering. In Remaking the John, you'll explore the many ways people across the globe and through the ages have invented—and reinvented—the toilet. You will learn about everything from ancient Roman sewers to the world's first flush toilets. You'll also find out about the twenty-first-century Reinvent the Toilet Challenge—an engineering contest designed to spur creation of an ecologically friendly, water-saving, inexpensive, and sanitary toilet. And while you're at it, mark World Toilet Day on your calendar. Observed every November 19, this international day of action works to raise awareness about the modern world's many sanitation challenges.

The toilet - it's small, functional and using it usually involves staring at a door. But for the water closet connoisseur, there are a handful of places where the loo is an area of outstanding beauty. From such fascinating locations as the summit loo on Mount Sinai and Maharajas' thrones in India to safari loos in Zambia and ultra-modern, multi-functional facilities in Japan, this is a collection of the most uplifting vistas from the latrines of the world. Answering the call of nature will take you from the functional to the sublime with the help of this, the ultimate good loo guide.