Referenced by generations of globe-trotting travelers and kept on bookshelves as dusty, dog-eared souvenirs, guidebooks have played an influential role in dissecting and shaping travel culture for over Two centuries.
In contrast towards the inherently fleeting attractions from the internet, these well-thumbed relics of grand tours and budget backpacking jaunts retain a nostalgic and romantic allure that's hard to replicate online. Open a furrowed Lonely Planet and dozens of memories come throwing out: the faded coffee-stains, a budget hostel reviews marked in yellow highlighter pen, the scribbled telephone number of the gap-year sociology student you met in Cuzco in nineteen-ninety-something but never reconnected with.
The travel guidebook takes shape
The exact origin of guidebooks is murky. Travel memoirs happen to be written provided humans happen to be going through the globe. However, what separates modern guidebooks from old-fashioned travelogues like The Travels of Marco Polo may be the inclusion of practical information written using the intention of encouraging readers to follow along with within the writer's footsteps.
An early pioneer of the art was Mariana Starke, an aspiring British poet and playwright who shared exactly the same publisher as Jane Austen and Lord Byron. Starke's 1802 book, Travels in Italy Between the Years 1792 and 1798 comprised an accumulation of travel memoirs that dispensed of overly romantic first-person descriptions of nature towards solid factual advice. Eager to smooth the passage for travelers brave enough to circumnavigate the battlefields of revolutionary France, Starke wrote up her observations of Italian churches and villas utilizing a subjective rating system according to one to five exclamation marks.
Starke's book languished as a little-used guide for over a decade, primarily because Europe was still being embroiled within the Napoleonic Wars and worryingly lacking congenial hotels. Things changed in 1815 once the Congress of Vienna ushered inside a protracted duration of peace, and European as well as gentlemen of means, inspired by the poetic prose of writers like Byron, expressed a growing desire to travel abroad.
As the map of Europe have been largely redrawn since Starke's 1802 guide, the author – by then well into her 50s – produced a far more comprehensive update. Published in 1820, Information and Directions for Travellers around the Continent covered Europe from Portugal to Russia and was full of pithy suggestions about “tolerable” inns, how to hire a horse carriage and the variable state from the continent's post-roads.
Starke's second book struck a chord, not just using the public, but additionally with its British publisher, John Murray, a foresighted man is not a ground-breaking idea if this landed on his desk (he later went on to write Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species).
Guidebooks come to be a business
Inspired by Starke's musings, Murray chose to get in on the travel guidebook business himself. In 1836, his Handbook for Travellers on the Continent ignited among the world's first guidebook series and quickly established a prototype for those books to come. Murray borrowed several ideas from Starke, including organizing subsections into itineraries, sightseeing spots, and inn listings.
Quality was Murray's hallmark. Demanding high standards of his writers and researchers, the “Murray Handbooks” using their trademark red covers and gold lettering were made by a competent pool of scribes, some of whom were noted literary figures. Richard Ford, a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, undertook two years of arduous research on horseback in Spain.
The resulting 1845 Murray's Handbook to Spain quickly morphed in to the Odyssey of travel guidebooks. By turns witty, opinionated, exhaustive and erudite, Ford's book and often prejudicial views on Spain helped place the country around the travel map. His priceless essays on Spanish music provide some of the earliest insights in to the nascent art of flamenco, while his expert ruminations on art and history helped kick-start a love affair with Spain among British travellers that endures to this day.
Baedeker guidebooks' beginnings
The rise of the Murray Handbooks in Britain coincided with the birth of some other brand in Germany. Bookseller and publisher Karl Baedeker launched his first book, the inauspicious Travels along the Rhine from Mainz to Cologne, in 1832 based on information obtained from a current guide he had purchased from a bankrupt publishing house. After refining his vision with ideas poached from Murray, the so-called “father of modern tourism” quickly hit on what became his best-selling formula: helpful information that encouraged the burgeoning European intelligentsia to travel independently without an expensive assemblage of servants and paid guides.
Some of Mr Baedeker's working methods are conversant today. He undertook his meticulous research covertly usually traveling by himself. “The entire items in it are based exclusively on personal expertise,” he wrote as a foreword to all his early editions. With the books fanning to cover multiple countries including France and Britain through the 1840s and 50s, personal research was a tall order. Baedeker, who was proficient in ten languages, did much of it solo and ultimately overreached himself. He died aged 57 in 1859, reputedly from overwork.
Murray Handbooks was sold off in 1900, but Baedeker, under the direction of Karl's son Fritz, continued to flourish, publishing an astounding 233 guides to over 40 countries between 1900 and 1914. Faultlessly accurate, though jarringly un-PC by modern-day standards, many of the books went on being classics. The Palestinian guide was mined extensively by TE Lawrence (of Arabia) during his archaeological digs in the centre East, as the encyclopedic 1929 Egyptian tome is widely considered to be probably the most accomplished guidebooks ever produced. Today, rare first editions of classic Baedekers can fetch as much as US$5,000 at auction.
So ubiquitous were the company's books that they were often name-checked by contemporary novelists and playwrights. EM Forster converted them into a simile ("their noses were as red his or her Baedekers") while TS Eliot referenced them in a poem ("Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein having a Cigar"). Through the 1920s, the verb “to Baedeker” had become a synonym for 'to travel'.
Events took a sinister submit World War II once the Nazis used Baedeker's 1937 Great Britain guide to pinpoint monuments in historic British cities for devastating bomb attacks. The so-called “Baedeker raids” were done in retaliation towards the British bombing of Lübeck in March 1942. “We'll go out and bomb every building in great britan given three stars within the Baedeker,” Nazi propagandist Gustav Braun von Stumm is said to possess proclaimed. Cultural sites in Exeter, Bath and York were all subsequently hit. Reprisals were swift. The following year British bombers destroyed Baedeker's publishing house in Leipzig.
Travel comes to the masses
With the onset of mass tourism in the 1960s and 70s, guidebooks proliferated, especially at the budget end from the market. Mega-brands grew from humble DIY roots to feed a new generation of freewheeling explorers christened “backpackers.” Arthur Frommer's self-published GI's Help guide to Traveling in Europe (1955), a thin volume initially targeted at American soldiers, morphed into Europe on $5 A Day. Let's Go guides arose from a concept hatched at Harvard University in 1960. The books, compiled by students for budget-seeking Americans, served as a fertile breeding ground for young authors, some of whom later graduated to careers in screenwriting, journalism and politics, including travel essayist Pico Iyer.
The biggest new innovators, Lonely Planet, emerged after founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler turned an inexpensive trip across Asia into a multimillion-dollar travel business whose guidebooks were so influential they became known as travel “bibles.” The Wheelers' initial 1973 book, Across Asia on the Cheap packed more than a dozen countries into just 94 pages and included gems of hippy-era budgetary advice (“In Afghanistan particularly you will get stoned just taking a deep breath within the streets”). Within two decades, the organization had remapped the planet, serving a new generation of time-rich, cash-poor twenty-somethings having a penchant for banana pancakes.
Like the Baedekers before them, Lonely Planet guidebooks were occasionally name-dropped in works of literature. Alex Garland's 1996 novel The Beach, occur Thailand, alludes to some whole culture of Lonely Planet travelers inadvertently reshaping the destinations they undergone. Along the way they created what became referred to as “banana pancake trail,” a network of cheap guesthouses and cafes in Southeast Asia whose spiritual home was Bangkok's Khao San Road.
The books also attracted notoriety. In the 1980s, Lonely Planet's Africa around the Cheap was banned in Malawi because of its criticisms from the country's president, Dr Hastings Banda. Two decades later, throughout the Iraq War and it is aftermath, the united states military allegedly used Lonely Planet's 1994 Middle East guide for information on the economy, government, and important embassies and buildings. “It's a great guidebook,” reflected US Ambassador, Barbara Bodine in 2007, “but it should not be the basis of the occupation.”
In the shortened attention-spans in our modern interconnected world, the guidebook's obituary continues to be written at regular intervals because the turn of the 21st century. Yet despite existential threats from blogs, booking websites and, recently, pandemics, there is something fundamental about guidebooks that still resonates. Standing the exam of time, they behave as poignant reminders in our life on the road, each one telling a distinctive and deeply personal story.
