As Anadelia A. Romo states early on in Selling Black Brazil, it is widely accepted that the principal figures of her study—Jorge Amado, Pierre Verger, and Carybé, each the subject of one of the book's chapters—were among the “chief architects of a Bahian regional identity,” crucial in developing the notion of Salvador as a place of folklore, festivity, and, above all, Blackness (p. 19). What Romo shows here is how the Bahian writer, the French photographer, and the Argentine Brazilian artist and their partners developed this “trademark” through the emergent tourism industry in the 1940s and 1950s, thus defining the city in the eyes of Bahians, other Brazilians, and foreigners as the home of Black Brazil. Romo also documents these figures' reach, demonstrating not only the near ubiquity of their idea of Salvador but also the failure of alternate renderings of the city to find purchase.Romo emphasizes the choices that Amado, Verger, Carybé, and their partners made, arguing that, despite their sometime claims, they did not simply bring attention to underappreciated aspects of Salvador's cultural scene. Theirs was work of invention, as they chose the Bahia they preferred to share, one “carefully considered, crafted, and constructed” (p. 118). Indeed, what made Amado's 1945 guide to the city “revolutionary,” Romo shows, was his departure from the choices that his predecessors in the field had made (p. 73). They tended to focus on either urban improvements or colonial architecture but rarely, if ever, its inhabitants. Amado insisted on Salvador's popular culture, its street festivals, its candomblé houses, and above all its Blackness, and thus he shared a specific and particular city with his readers, both its streets and its “mysteries,” as the guide's subtitle put it, rather than its skyscrapers and modern avenues. Both were Salvador, but Amado's depiction of the city was so powerful and attractive that it came to seem like the only one worth offering to visitors.If some of what Romo shows is familiar to specialists, it is in her demonstration of the extent to which the invention of Salvador was a visual argument that she makes an especially significant contribution. Each of the dozens of travel guides and other publications she examines was illustrated, artists helping authors advance the idea that Salvador was the home of Brazilian Blackness, festive and popular. In fact, tourism's visual culture was crucial to this process because photographers like Verger and artists like Carybé consistently went further than the writers whose volumes they illustrated; the artists offered a narrower vision of Salvador than did the writers, one more focused on the city's folklife, its festivals, and its Black people. For example, in his pioneering work Amado drew special attention to Black popular culture while also introducing readers to white neighborhoods, colonial churches, and other subjects, but in the book's woodcuts Manuel Martins offered a “tighter narrative,” singularly focused on Black urban life (p. 77). Romo makes the case convincingly, not least because she presents dozens of well-selected images that demonstrate the long history of depictions of the city, from the cartes de visite and postcards of the nineteenth century, which condensed Salvador to its “types,” especially slave laborers, to Carybé's simple black-line drawings of streets and festivals.These depictions were always heavily gendered, a theme most fully developed in the book's final chapter, on tourism's interest in candomblé. Though Pierre Verger was particularly interested in male laborers, Romo shows how the visual culture of tourism came to depict Salvador as embodied in the baiana, the Afro-Brazilian woman dressed in the traditional skirts, shawl, and head scarf often associated with the religion. This was a complicated story, at once empowering and delimiting. On the one hand, elite interest in their beliefs afforded individual temple leaders like Mãe Senhora considerable agency over their depiction, and tourism helped to legitimize often persecuted practices. On the other, civic authorities understood candomblé as a folk tradition to be shared with tourists, not a genuine religion, and its partial acceptance tended to narrow the space available for Black residents of the city. In other words, tourism and its visual culture helped assign Black men and, especially, women carefully crafted roles as purveyors of tourist fare rather than as full citizens.As Romo mentions, it is well worth considering how the legitimizing of another long-derided Afro-Brazilian practice, capoeira, figured in the selling of Salvador, given that it complicated attempts to present the city as closely connected with candomblé and its purportedly “festive female religiosity” (p. 211). Similarly, she calls attention to the extent to which the story of tourism's visual culture is not only a Brazilian story but an American one, and she makes occasional and evocative references to similar stories elsewhere, such as Peru and Mexico, where tourism imagery helped conflate each nation with its “native” elements. In Selling Black Brazil, Romo has provided important touchstones for such comparative work. More important, she has deepened our knowledge of both the emergence of Brazilian tourism, which is still, surprisingly, very little studied, and the process of invention that transformed Salvador into Black Rome.