The Book of Tiki

The cultural history.

The Book of Tiki: The Cult of Polynesian Pop in Fifties America is the foundational cultural-history text for the genre. Sven Kirsten spent fifteen years researching and writing it, documenting the surviving mid-century tiki bars, interviewing aging practitioners, photographing the architecture and carvings, and assembling the visual and intellectual record of an American aesthetic movement that was disappearing.

Published by Taschen in 2000, large-format and lavishly illustrated, the book did more than any single text to establish exotic cocktails and their aesthetic context as worthy of serious scholarly attention.

What’s in it

The book covers the full mid-century Polynesian Pop phenomenon:

• The founding figures. Donn Beach, Trader Vic, and the bartenders who followed.
• The architects. Florian Gabriel, the designers of Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s, the wider tropical-restaurant architectural tradition.
• The carvers. Eli Hedley, Witco, Oceanic Arts—the artisans who built the tiki carvings that defined the visual aesthetic.
• The musicians. Exotica—Martin Denny, Les Baxter, Arthur Lyman—and how the music propagated alongside the cocktails.
• The wider cultural moment. Mid-century American attitudes toward the Pacific, the post-war tropical fantasy, the Polynesian Pop diffusion through suburbia.
• The collapse and revival. The 1970s and ’80s decline; the late-90s rediscovery.

The book is illustrated with hundreds of photographs—original menus, postcards, matchbooks, bar interiors, exterior signage, carvings, mugs, and ephemera. Kirsten’s own collection is reportedly one of the largest in private hands, and the book draws on it heavily.

Why it matters

The Book of Tiki established the intellectual framework the modern revival uses to talk about itself. The term Polynesian Pop—the periodization, the recognition that this is a derivative American aesthetic with its own internal coherence, the willingness to take the kitsch seriously—comes from Kirsten and propagates from this book.

It also did practical preservation work. Many of the bars and carvings Kirsten documented are now gone; the book is the surviving record. The visual archive is invaluable.

For the modern revival, this is the cultural-history pillar—the parallel to Sippin’ Safari’s cocktail-history pillar. The two books together are the academic floor of serious tiki study.

To go deeper

• Related People Sven Kirsten.
• Companion books Tiki Modern (2007), Tiki Pop (2014). Both extend the work.