June 3, 1999

LIBRARY / CITY GUIDES

Taking the Old Baedeker Into the Next Century

By TOM VANDERBILT

In ""Leading the Blind,"" his study of nineteenth century European guidebook travel, the writer Alan Sillitoe traces the emergence of guidebooks like Baedeker's and Murray's to the increasing popularity of travel among those outside of the strictly leisured classes.



Rebecca Cooney
Overview

• Taking the Old Baedeker Into the Next Century

This Week's Articles

• Sidewalk

• New York Today

• Digital City

• Citysearch.com

• Center for Land Use Interpretation


""Tourists,"" as these newly itinerant classes would be derisively called, were the first hardy souls to use the guidebooks, which Sillitoe called ""educated dogs which led the blind."" They were essential to understanding the character and mores of foreign places for those travelers unprepared by their upbringing.

The hazards were many. In France, Murray's guide warned, the civilized traveler ought to eschew dining at the common table at inns, for the company was less than desirable: ""Without denying that there are exceptions among these gentry, it is impossible to have sojourned in France for any time without the conviction that a more selfish, depraved, and vulgar, if not brutal, set does not exist, and gentlemen will take good care not to encourage their approaches, and to keep a distance from them.""

In Switzerland, one guide counseled, buying a memento is a challenge as imposing as the Matterhorn: ""There is hardly a country in Europe which has so complicated a currency as Switzerland; almost every canton has a coinage of its own, and those coins that are current in one canton will not pass in the next."" In Italy, train travel made for a less arduous journey, but one still had to be wary of brigands and malaria.

Compared with this litany of risk, the concerns of today's guidebooks seem petty.

Tourism is now the world's No. 1 industry, and much of travel seems like an assembly-line process: automated car rental, last-minute E-fares, global A.T.M. card access.

Instead of brigands, the most intimidating obstacle can be something like getting frequent flier credit for that last leg of the trip to Caracas on Avianca.

Still, the increased frequency of travel and the increased travel population make information all the more important.

Travelers on the Grand Tour of the Continent might have had time to take in events as they discovered them, but today's weekend continent-hoppers need up-to-the-minute information.

With new restaurants opening (and closing weekly), what hope does even an annually updated guidebook have of charting New York?

It is not surprising then that city guides emerged as an early, much-touted presence on the Internet. With a seemingly infinite amount of space for listings, an ability to perform searches under any number of criteria, and, increasingly, the option of purchasing tickets for events, the Internet city guides seem to offer a guidebook, the Yellow Pages, the daily newspaper, and even the rancor of public discourse all rolled into one, a tribune for our time.

There are limitations, however.

For one, keeping track of all that information still requires people to enter it, and many online city guides are less current than they suggest. Another limitation is the guides' scope: not every guide covers every city. Citysearch, for example, has a Danish version and is planning a Phoenix edition, but lacks Chicago in between. (The Internet, however, has spawned myriad quirky, low-budget, guides that are produced locally.)

Yet whatever their weaknesses, the sites have become a sort of daily guidebook to an increasingly complicated life. To test them, I attempted to navigate each site in the hope of finding one of the 53 Alfred Hitchcock films being shown this month at the Museum of Modern Art and, for later in the day, a local video store for something more current.

In my estimation, the best way of experiencing a city is merely wading into the human flow and letting the city's own rhythms and contours carry one along, with stimulation of the senses the only destination. But for those who favor the cultural equivalent of global positioning systems, these latter-day guide dogs have learned a few new tricks.




Home | Site Index | Site Search | Forums | Archives | Marketplace

Quick News | Page One Plus | International | National/N.Y. | Business | Technology | Science | Sports | Weather | Editorial | Op-Ed | Arts | Automobiles | Books | Diversions | Job Market | Real Estate | Travel

Help/Feedback | Classifieds | Services | New York Today

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company