Guide book

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A guide book to the 1915 Panama-California Exposition Guide Book of the Panama California Exposition.jpg
A guide book to the 1915 Panama–California Exposition
An assortment of guide books in Japan Guide book-Lu Xing gaidobutsukuPA024792.jpg
An assortment of guide books in Japan

A guide book or travel guide is "a book of information about a place designed for the use of visitors or tourists". [1] It will usually include information about sights, accommodation, restaurants, transportation, and activities. Maps of varying detail and historical and cultural information are often included. Different kinds of guide books exist, focusing on different aspects of travel, from adventure travel to relaxation, or aimed at travelers with different incomes, or focusing on sexual orientation or types of diet.

Contents

Travelguides or guidebook can also take the form of travel websites.

History

A Japanese tourist consulting a tour guide and a guide book from Akizato Rito's Miyako meisho zue (1787) "A Tour Guide to the Famous Places of the Capital" from Akizato Rito's Miyako meisho zue (1787).jpg
A Japanese tourist consulting a tour guide and a guide book from Akizato Ritō's Miyako meisho zue (1787)

Antiquity

A forerunner of the guidebook was the periplus , an itinerary from landmark to landmark of the ports along a coast. A periplus such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea was a manuscript document that listed, in order, the ports and coastal landmarks, with approximate intervening distances, that the captain of a vessel could expect to find along a shore. This work was possibly written in the middle of the 1st century CE. [2] It served the same purpose as the later Roman itinerarium of road stops.

The periegesis, or "progress around" was an established literary genre during the Hellenistic age. A lost work by Agaclytus describing Olympia (περὶ Ὀλυμπίας) is referred to by the Suda and Photius. [3] [4] Dionysius Periegetes (literally, Dionysius the Traveller) was the author of a description of the habitable world in Greek hexameter verse written in a terse and elegant style, intended for the klismos traveller rather than the actual tourist on the ground; he is believed to have worked in Alexandria and to have flourished around the time of Hadrian. An early "remarkably well-informed and interesting guidebook" was the Hellados Periegesis (Descriptions of Greece) of Pausanias of the 2nd century A.D. [5] This most famous work is a guide to the interesting places, works of architecture, sculpture, and curious customs of Ancient Greece, and is still useful to Classicists today. With the advent of Christianity, the guide for the European religious pilgrim became a useful guidebook. An early account is that of the pilgrim Egeria, who visited the Holy Land in the 4th century CE and left a detailed itinerary.

In the medieval Arab world, guide books for travelers in search of artifacts and treasures were written by Arabic treasure hunters, magicians, and alchemists. This was particularly the case in Arab Egypt, where treasure hunters were eager to find valuable ancient Egyptian antiquities. Some of the books claimed to be imbued with magic that could dispel the magical barriers believed to be protecting the artifacts. [6]

Travelogues

Travel literature became popular during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) of medieval China. The genre was called 'travel record literature' (youji wenxue), and was often written in narrative, prose, essay and diary style. Travel literature authors such as Fan Chengda (1126–1193) and Xu Xiake (1587–1641) incorporated a wealth of geographical and topographical information into their writing, while the 'daytrip essay' Record of Stone Bell Mountain by the noted poet and statesman Su Shi (1037–1101) presented a philosophical and moral argument as its central purpose. [7]

In the West, the guidebook developed from the published personal experiences of aristocrats who traveled through Europe on the Grand Tour. As the appreciation of art, architecture and antiquity became ever-more essential ingredients of the noble upbringing so they predominated in the guidebooks, particularly those devoted to the Italian peninsula. Richard Lassels (1603–1668) wrote a series of manuscript guides which were eventually published posthumously in Paris and London (1670) as The Voyage of Italy. [8] Grand Tour guidebooks poured off the presses throughout the eighteenth century, those such as Patrick Brydone's A Tour Through Sicily and Malta being read by many who never left England. [9]

Between 1626 and 1649, the Dutch publisher, Officina Elzeviriana (House of Elzevir), published a bestselling pocketbook series, the Respublicae Elzevirianae (Elzevirian Republics), which has been described as the "ancestor of the modern travel guide". [10] Each volume gave information (geography, population, economy, history) on a country in Europe, Africa, the Near East or the Far East. [11]

An important transitional figure from the idiosyncratic style of the Grand Tour travelogues to the more informative and impersonal guidebook was Mariana Starke. Her 1824 guide to travel in France and Italy served as an essential companion for British travelers to the Continent in the early 19th century. She recognized that with the growing numbers of Britons traveling abroad after 1815 the majority of her readers would now be in family groups and on a budget. She therefore included for the first time a wealth of advice on luggage, obtaining passports, the precise cost of food and accommodation in each city and even advice on the care of invalid family members. She also devised a system of exclamation mark ratings [!!!], a forerunner of today's star ratings. Her books, published by John Murray, served as a template for later guides.

In the United States, the first published guidebook was Gideon Minor Davison's The Fashionable Tour, published in 1822, and Theodore Dwight's The Northern Traveller and Henry Gilpin's The Northern Tour, both from 1825. [12]

Modern guidebook

John Murray. John Murray b1788.jpg
John Murray.

The modern guidebook emerged in the 1830s, with the burgeoning market for long distance tourism. The publisher John Murray began printing the Murray's Handbooks for Travellers in London from 1836. [13] The series covered tourist destinations in Europe, Asia and northern Africa, and he introduced the concept of "sights" which he rated in terms of their significance using stars for Starke's exclamation points. According to scholar James Buzard, the Murray style "exemplified the exhaustive rational planning that was as much an ideal of the emerging tourist industry as it was of British commercial and industrial organization generally." [14]

Karl Baedeker. Karl Baedeker.jpg
Karl Baedeker.

In Germany, Karl Baedeker acquired the publishing house of Franz Friedrich Röhling in Koblenz, which in 1828 had published a handbook for travellers by Professor Johannes August Klein entitled Rheinreise von Mainz bis Cöln; ein Handbuch für Schnellreisende (A Rhine Journey from Mainz to Cologne; A Handbook for Travellers on the Move). He published this book with little changes for the next ten years, which provided the seeds for Baedeker's new approach to travel guides. After Klein died, he decided to publish a new edition in 1839, to which he added many of his own ideas on what he thought a travel guide should offer the traveller. Baedeker's ultimate aim was to free the traveller from having to look for information anywhere outside the travel guide; whether about routes, transport, accommodation, restaurants, tipping, sights, walks or prices. Baedeker emulated the style of John Murray's guidebooks, [15] but included unprecedented detailed information.

In 1846, Baedeker introduced his star ratings for sights, attractions and lodgings, following Mrs. Starke's and Murray's. This edition was also his first "experimental" red guide. He also decided to call his travel guides "handbooks", following the example of John Murray III. Baedeker's early guides had tan covers, but from 1856 onwards, Murray's red bindings and gilt lettering became the familiar hallmark of all Baedeker guides as well, and the content became famous for its clarity, detail and accuracy. [16]

Cover of Handbook for Travellers in Turkey, 1871 1871 Murrays Handbook for Travellers in Turkey.png
Cover of Handbook for Travellers in Turkey, 1871

Baedeker and Murray produced impersonal, objective guides; works prior to this combined factual information and personal sentimental reflection. [16] The availability of the books by Baedeker and Murray helped sharpen and formalize the complementary genre of the personal travelogue, which was freed from the burden of serving as a guide book. [16] The Baedeker and Murray guide books were hugely popular and were standard resources for travelers well into the 20th century. As William Wetmore Story said in the 1860s, "Every Englishman abroad carries a Murray for information, and a Byron for sentiment, and finds out by them what he is to know and feel by every step."

After Karl Baedeker died, his son, also named Karl, inherited the Baedeker travel guide business; however, he was killed in action during World War I. British nationalism and anti-German sentiment resulted in some British people labeling Baedeker guides "instrumental to the German war effort", and their popularity in the United Kingdom dropped considerably. [17] As a result, the two editors of Baedeker's English-language titles left the company and acquired the rights to Murray's Handbooks. The resulting guide books, called the Blue Guides to distinguish them from the red-covered Baedekers, constituted one of the major guide book series for much of the 20th century and are still published today.

Post-WW2

Soon after World War II, two new names emerged which combined European and American perspectives on international travel. Eugene Fodor, a Hungarian-born author of travel articles, who had emigrated to the United States before the war, wrote guidebooks which introduced English-reading audiences to continental Europe. Arthur Frommer, an American soldier stationed in Europe during the Korean War, used his experience traveling around the Continent as the basis for Europe on $5 a Day (1957), which introduced readers to options for budget travel in Europe. Both authors' guidebooks became the foundations for extensive series, eventually covering destinations around the world.

Since then, Let's Go, Lonely Planet, Insight Guides, Rough Guides, Eyewitness Travel Guides and many other travel guide series have been published.

For specific activities

Specialist guides for mountains have a long history owing to the special needs of mountaineering, climbing, hill walking and scrambling. The guides by W A Poucher for example, are widely used for the hill regions of Britain. There are many more special guides to the numerous climbing grounds in Britain published by the Climbers Club, for example.

Travel guides are made for diving destinations and specific dive sites. These have been published as magazine articles, stand-alone books and websites, often publicising the dive sites in the vicinity of specific service providers.

Digital world

With the emergence of digital technology, many publishers turned to electronic distribution, either in addition to or instead of print publication. This can take the form of downloadable documents for reading on a portable computer or hand held device such a PDA or iPod, or online information accessible via a web site. This enabled guidebook publishers to keep their information more current. Traditional guide book incumbents Lonely Planet, Frommers, Rough Guides, and In Your Pocket City Guides, and newcomers such as Schmap [18] or Ulysses [19] Travel Guides are now offering travel guides for download. New online and interactive guides such as Tripadvisor, Wikivoyage, and Travellerspoint enable individual travelers to share their own experiences and contribute information to the guide. Wikivoyage, CityLeaves, and Travellerspoint make the entire contents of their guides updatable by users, and make the information in their guides available as open content, free for others to use.

Guide book publishers

This list is a select sample of the full range of English language guide book publishers - either contemporary or historical.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baedeker</span> German publisher of worldwide travel guides

Verlag Karl Baedeker, founded by Karl Baedeker on 1 July 1827, is a German publisher and pioneer in the business of worldwide travel guides. The guides, often referred to simply as "Baedekers", contain, among other things, maps and introductions; information about routes and travel facilities; and descriptions of noteworthy buildings, sights, attractions and museums, written by specialists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grand Tour</span> Journey around Europe for cultural education

The Grand Tour was the principally 17th- to early 19th-century custom of a traditional trip through Europe, with Italy as a key destination, undertaken by upper-class young European men of sufficient means and rank when they had come of age.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Baedeker</span> German publisher (1801–1859)

Karl Ludwig Johannes Baedeker was a German publisher whose company, Baedeker, set the standard for authoritative guidebooks for tourists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Travel literature</span> Literary genre

The genre of travel literature or travelogue encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs.

Footprint Travel Guides is the imprint of Footprint Handbooks Ltd, a publisher of guidebooks based in Bath in the United Kingdom. Particularly noted for their coverage of Latin America, their South American Handbook, first published in 1924, is in its 90th edition and is updated annually. The company now publish more than 200 titles covering many destinations. Since 2008, all handbook guides are published in lightweight hardback.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literary tourism</span> Tourism based on places associated with locations in fiction

Literary tourism is a type of cultural tourism that deals with places and events from literary texts as well as the lives of their authors. This could include visiting particular place associated with a novel or a novelist, such as a writer's home, or grave site, following routes taken by a fictional characters, visiting places mentioned in poems, as well as visiting museums dedicated to specific writers, works, regional literatures, and literary genres.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tour guide</span> Person who provides information and heritage interpretation to tourists

A tour guide (U.S.) or a tourist guide (European) is a person who provides assistance, and information on cultural, historical and contemporary heritage to people on organized sightseeing and individual clients at educational establishments, religious and historical sites such as; museums, and at various venues of tourist attraction resorts. Tour guides also take clients on outdoor guided trips. These trips include hiking, whitewater rafting, mountaineering, alpine climbing, rock climbing, ski and snowboarding in the backcountry, fishing, and biking.

Insight Guides, founded by Hans Johannes Hofer, is a travel company based in London with offices in Singapore and Warsaw. It sells customised package tours as well as guide books for hundreds of destinations worldwide. It also produces guide books, travel books, maps, globes, and travel gadgets for travelers.

<i>The Tough Guide to Fantasyland</i> Nonfiction book by Diana Wynne Jones

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a nonfiction book by the British author Diana Wynne Jones that humorously examines the common tropes of a broad swathe of fantasy fiction. The U.S. Library of Congress calls it a dictionary. However, it may be called a fictional or parodic tourist guidebook. It was first published by Vista Books (London) in 1996. A revised and updated edition was completed in 2006 and published by Penguin, first in the U.S.

Mariana Starke (1762–1838) was an influential English travel writer, though she also worked in other genres. She is best known for her travel guides to France and Italy, popular with British travellers to the Continent in the early nineteenth century. She wrote plays early in her career, before embarking on her first trip abroad in 1791. She worked as a translator over most of her working life, and latterly, also wrote poetry.

A Handbook for Travellers in Spain is an 1845 work of travel literature by English writer Richard Ford. It has been described as a defining moment in the genre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blue Guides</span>

The Blue Guides are a series of detailed and authoritative travel guidebooks focused on art, architecture, and archaeology along with the history and context necessary to understand them. A modicum of practical travel information, with recommended restaurants and hotels, is also generally included.

Christopher P. Baker is a professional travel writer and photographer, adventure motorcyclist, tour leader, and Cuba expert, and the 2008 Lowell Thomas Award 'Travel Journalist of the Year.' He is a contributor to magazines and other publications worldwide, and is the author of travel guidebooks for publishers such as Dorling Kindersley, Lonely Planet, Moon Publications, and National Geographic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Guide Series</span> Local tourism guides by WPA employees

The American Guide Series includes books and pamphlets published from 1937 to 1941 under the auspices of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), a Depression-era program that was part of the larger Works Progress Administration in the United States. The American Guide Series books were compiled by the FWP, but printed by individual states, and contained detailed histories of each of the then 48 states of the Union with descriptions of every major city and town. The series not only detailed the histories of the 48 states, but provided insight to their cultures as well. In total, the project employed over 6,000 writers. The format was uniform, comprising essays on the state's history and culture, descriptions of its major cities, automobile tours of important attractions, and a portfolio of photographs.

<i>Murrays Handbooks for Travellers</i>


Murray's Handbooks for Travellers were travel guide books published in London by John Murray beginning in 1836. The series covered tourist destinations in Europe and parts of Asia and northern Africa. According to scholar James Buzard, the Murray style "exemplified the exhaustive rational planning that was as much an ideal of the emerging tourist industry as it was of British commercial and industrial organization generally." The guidebooks became popular enough to appear in works of fiction such as Charles Lever's Dodd Family Abroad. After 1915 the series continued as the Blue Guides and the familiar gold gilted red Murrays Handbooks published by John Murray London including the long running Handbook to India, Pakistan, Ceylon & Burma which concluded with the 21st edition in 1968 before changing from the original format of 1836 to a more modern paperback edition of 1975.

<i>Harpers Hand-Book for Travellers</i> Series of travel guide books

Harper's Hand-Book for Travellers (est.1862) was a series of travel guide books published by Harper & Brothers of New York. Each annual edition contained information for tourists in Europe and parts of the Middle East. The "indefatigable" William Pembroke Fetridge wrote most of the guides from 1862 until at least 1885. In its day the Harper's Hand-Book competed with popular guides such as Baedeker, Bradshaw's, and Murray's. In 1867 critic William Dean Howells found Harper's Hand-Book "chatty and sociable." Readers included Lucy Baird, daughter of Spencer F. Baird.

<i>Appletons</i> travel guides

Appletons' travel guide books were published by D. Appleton & Company of New York. The firm's series of guides to railway travel in the United States began in the 1840s. Soon after it issued additional series of handbooks for tourists in the United States, Europe, Canada and Latin America.

<i>Cooks Travellers Handbooks</i>

Cook's Tourists' Handbooks were a series of travel guide books for tourists published in the 19th-20th centuries by Thomas Cook & Son of London. The firm's founder, Thomas Cook, produced his first handbook to England in the 1840s, later expanding to Europe, Near East, North Africa, and beyond. Compared with other guides such as Murray's, Cook's aimed at "a broader and less sophisticated middle-class audience." The books served to advertise Cook's larger business of organizing travel tours. The series continues today as Traveller Guides issued by Thomas Cook Publishing of Peterborough, England.

James Fullarton Muirhead (1853-1934) was a Scottish editor and writer of travel guides, associated with the Baedeker publishing house for many years, prior to starting his own publishing house.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jemima Morrell</span> English traveller and illustrator (1832–1909)

Jemima Anne Morrell was an English traveller and illustrator. Morrell was born into a middle-class family in Selby, Yorkshire and was a member of the Junior United Alpine Club, a club with majority women members that organised annual holiday trips. Morrell was one of the tourists who in 1863 partook in the first ever guided tour of Switzerland, led and conducted by Thomas Cook, making her one of the first modern international tourists. Her account of the journey was published in 1963 under the title Miss Jemima's Swiss Journal: The First Conducted Tour of Switzerland.

References

  1. ↑ New Oxford American Dictionary
  2. ↑ Kish, George (1978). A Source Book in Geography . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p.  21. ISBN   0-674-82270-6.
  3. ↑ Suda, s.v.Κυψελιδῶν
  4. ↑ Smith, William (1870). Smith, William (ed.). "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology". 1. Boston: Agaclytus: 57.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ↑ J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 369.
  6. ↑ El Daly, Okasha (2004). Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings. Routledge. p. 36. ISBN   1844720632.
  7. ↑ Hargett, James M. (1985). "Some Preliminary Remarks on the Travel Records of the Song Dynasty (960–1279)". Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews. 7 (1/2): 67–93. doi:10.2307/495194. JSTOR   495194.
  8. ↑ Edward Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion (Geneva-Turin, 1985)
  9. ↑ E. Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour, revised ed. (Routledge, 2000)
  10. ↑ Lyons, Martyn (2011). Books: A Living History. Getty Publications. p. 80. ISBN   9781606060834.
  11. ↑ Republics (or: Elzevirian Republics) (Elzevir) – Book Series List, publishinghistory.com. Retrieved 8 March 2020.
  12. ↑ Richard Gassan, "The First American Tourist Guidebooks: Authorship and Print Culture of the 1820s," Book History 8 (2005), pp. 51–74.
  13. ↑ Rudy Koshar (July 1998). "'What Ought to Be Seen': Tourists' Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe". Journal of Contemporary History. 33.
  14. ↑ James Buzard (Autumn 1991). "The Uses of Romanticism: Byron and the Victorian Continental Tour". Victorian Studies. 35.
  15. ↑ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Baedeker, Karl"  . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  16. 1 2 3 James Buzzard. "The Grand Tour and after (1660–1840)" in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2002), pp. 48–50.
  17. ↑ Larabee, M. D. (2010). Baedekers as Casualty: Great War Nationalism and the Fate of Travel Writing. Journal of the History of Ideas, 71(3), 457–480.
  18. ↑ "Cultural Travel Guides". Schmap. 30 September 2011. Retrieved August 4, 2021.
  19. ↑ "Ulysses Travel Guides". Ulysses. Retrieved August 4, 2021.
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