For many of us, our first significant experience of using a map has been abroad – in the pages of a travel guide. And so it has been for quite some time. Guidebooks are almost as old as maps. The Romans had periplus documents, noting ports and coastal landmarks, and itinerarium, which listed road stops, and in the second century, Pausanias created an impressively complete guide to the most interesting sights of the Ancient Greek world.
But for the first tourist guide worthy of the name we need to look to the year 330, when an anonymous traveller embarked on a pilgrimage and wrote an account called Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem. This was also the first boring postcard, a long listing of where he’d stayed and how long it had taken him to get there. The writer noted the number of times he had to change his transport, and found he could do Europe on two or three donkeys a day.
On the first leg – Bordeaux to Constantinople – he made 112 stops (or ‘halts’), 230 changes of donkey, and had travelled 2221 miles. The closer the traveller got to his destination, the more excited he became. His remarks became more fulsome, the sights he listed more beautiful, and his tales taller: just beyond Judea he observed Mt Syna, ‘where there is a fountain, in which, if a woman bathes, she becomes pregnant.’ The manuscript contained no maps, but the ‘A to B to C’ descriptions served in their place. The Roman roads had mile markers, and pilgrims who followed in our traveller’s footsteps would have little trouble finding their way.
Maps have guided the tourist long before the notion of tourism began (the word itself stems from the Greek word tour, meaning movement around a circle; middle-English took it further, to a trip or journey that ends up in the same place it began.) The Hereford Mappa Mundi served as both a geographical and spiritual tour for pilgrims, and John Ogilby’s strip maps escorted travellers through Britain in the seventeenth century, promising a wayside inn or famous church every few miles. But tourist maps as we understand them today had another beginning, a birth allied to the cheap portable guidebook and the beginnings of popular travel in nineteenth-century Europe.
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Before the 1830s, the Grand Tour of Europe required an educated local guide (a cicerone) and considerable amounts of money. But from 1836 onwards, the landscape was different, for you could travel through Holland, Belgium, Prussia and Northern Germany independently, armed only with a copy of what soon came to be known as a Murray. This was the first truly modern guidebook and it enabled travellers to venture where they wished, absorb as much information about a dusty monument as the heat would allow, and be assured of getting a decent dinner and bed at the end of it. Apart from the tiny point-size of the type, the Murray Handbooks for Travellers were largely the same things we might buy at a railway station or airport today: a nice bit of history, scenic and literary descriptions, detailed walking routes, passport and currency requirements, a check-list of packing essentials, recommended hotels, a few maps, and some elegant panoramic pull-out strips with a plan of a museum or the layout of Tuscan hills. The other main difference was, they were better.
Within a few years, the handbooks had become as essential a companion for the inquisitive and educated English traveller as an umbrella and emergency rations from Fortnum’s. With their success allied to growing Victorian prosperity and the rapid spread of the railways, they also achieved something else: they made travel possible for independent women, as tourists and even as guidebook writers. And with this, women discovered maps like never before. Before now, maps had primarily been a male affair, indispensable for exploration, crucial for the military, essential for planning and power. But now women began to experience the value and joy of maps not just for travel but for perusal and possibility. It was the era of maps for the masses.
John Murray III, the latest member of a flourishing London publishing dynasty (his father had secured the firm’s reputation by publishing Lord Byron and Jane Austen), had been travelling in Europe in the late 1820s when he noticed a paucity of anything that might help him make the most of his days. In Italy he found a book by Mariana Starke particularly useful (Starke was also published by his father), but elsewhere Murray found that he would arrive by brand new steam train or stagecoach, and had no idea what to do next. So he resolved to write such a thing himself, recommending the good experiences and castigating the bad. He laid out his terms for a successful template, noting that the guides had to be factual, devoid of fancy writing, and selective. ‘Arriving at a city like Berlin, I had to find out what was really worth seeing there,’ he explained. So he would provide a guide rather than an encyclopaedia, as he was keen on ‘not bewildering my readers by describing all that MIGHT be seen.’ It was the early Victorian equivalent of the What’s Hot list, and it was received by a hugely enthusiastic readership keen to discover a new Europe after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars had curtailed travelling for twenty-five years.
Murray wrote the first few guides himself, covering Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and France, but was prevented from covering Italy when the death of his father demanded that he concentrate on publishing duties in London. And so he commissioned others, most of whom were already experts in their assigned regions.* The series ran to some sixty titles in as many years – stretching as far as imperialist India, New Zealand and Japan, and returning to concentrate on British counties. The guides soon received the ultimate sign of fame, a parodic paean in Punch:
So well thou’st played the hand-book’s part
For inn a hint, for routes a chart,
That every line I’ve got by heart,
My Murray.
(‘My Murray’ was the phrase Lord Byron used to refer to his publisher. Byron was also responsible for popularising the word ‘guidebook’, practically unheard of before it appeared in his Don Juan in 1823.)
The majority of the early handbooks consisted of routes to be accomplished in a day, but there were few maps to accompany them. Those that were included were usually secured from civic sources and then updated to show new railways and other developments. Indeed, the spread of the railway network through Europe from the mid-1830s is elegantly tracked on the Murray maps like nowhere else. But the main visual treats were unexpected, such as a fold-out engraving in the 1843 guide to Switzerland of the chain of Mont Blanc, or the pull-out of the pyramids in late-1880s Egypt, and the occasional Greek phrase-book in an envelope glued to the cover.
But great ideas tend not to profit in isolation. In Koblenz, Germany, Karl Baedeker, the son of a printer, knew a good idea when he saw one. He was a fan of the earliest Murrays, recognising just the things he had wanted to publish himself. He had issued his first guidebook to accompany the popular Rhine cruises a year before the first Murray, but he had acquired it by default when he bought a bankrupt publishing house. For his own guidebooks he adopted not only Murray’s red covers with gold lettering, but also large swathes of Murray’s text, sometimes garbling the translations. Murray’s description in an early Swiss guide of a place where ‘the rocks … are full of red garnets’ became, in the Baedeker, ‘overgrown with red pomegranates’.
Murray’s map of Bangalore, from the Handbook to India, Burma and Ceylon, 1924.
Despite the instances of plagiarism, Baedeker and Murray became friends, each agreeing not to publish in each other’s language – a promise that held good until the early 1860s, when one of Baedeker’s sons, also called Karl, couldn’t resist the opportunity to expand the market. But by 1860, one could argue, the Baedeker had perfected the guidebook form, outgunning even Murray to become the accepted byword for the failsafe travel companion. By the end of the century, one could easily tour the world without leaving home: in 1883 the series extended into Russia, and a decade later it had penetrated the United States. The writing was strict, unequivocal and trustworthy, the information current, the routes exhausting but fulfilling, the tastes tailored to a demanding yet non-academic readership. The whole experience was intellectually and spiritually uplifting.
Baedekering became a verb, while a Baedeker came to mean any reliable and comprehensive guide to anything (The Joy of Sex was once reviewed as A Baedeker of Bedroom Techniques.) The Baedeker style (with many parentheses denoting subsidiary yet important information such as cab fares) became influential, and Baedeker also developed the star rating system – ubiquitous now as shorthand before any arts or leisure review. Places he thought unmissable – the Tribuna in the Uffizi, for example – would get two stars for its Raphaels, but other places that met his disapproval, including Mont Blanc, were awarded no stars (‘the view from the summit is unsatisfactory’).
The guides inevitably attracted flak. In A Room with a View, E.M. Forster observed how they closed one’s mind rather than opened it, directing the traveller up or down a pew in regimental fashion and acting as a protective veil against authentic emotion. Later and more damagingly, the guides were adopted by the Nazis, who noted areas cleared of Jews, and Baedeker’s Britain served as a template for Hitler’s deliberate cultural destruction in the so-called ‘Baedeker raids’, when German bombers were sent to wipe out star-sites to demoralise the enemy.
Maps and panoramas folding out luxuriantly from Baedeker’s Rhineland.
But for the fan of cartography, the classic Baedekers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century remain dazzling. Far more generous in number than Murray, the Baedeker maps covered both city and rural walking routes, and were particularly strong on ancient sites and mountain passes. Each new edition usually brought new maps, and just as well, for their propensity to tear, crumble and become detached from their bindings – they came at you from all angles – was as much of a feature as their topography. From one single map accompanying a reprinting of the Rhine guide in 1846, there were suddenly seventeen in the edition of 1866 and seventy in 1912. There was one lonely Swiss map in 1852, but eighty-two in 1930.
The maps began as simple engravings, but appeared in two or three colours from 1870. It was fitting, given its pedigree as the centre of so many medieval maps, that the first colour map was of Jerusalem (in the volume on Palestine and Syria). The colours chosen became lodged in the mind as no cartographic branding before it. The inland and dense city areas appeared in an ochre reminiscent of the clay dust one is unable to wash away from holiday sandals, while the green looked arsenical and the washed-out pastel blue made the coastal regions and lagoons look dry and oddly unappealing.*
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The Baedekers – in their classic editions – disappeared after the Second World War. Murray’s Handbooks had been sold some years before, in 1910, to Stanfords, before being acquired in 1915 by two Scottish brothers, James and Findlay Muirhead. The Muirheads had actually worked at Baedeker’s, editing the English language editions, until the outbreak of the First World War found them out of a job. They continued the learned, encyclopedic traditions of the two grand guides as the Blue Guides, which for a decade or two operated an Anglo-French alliance, before Les Guides Bleus went their own Gallic way in the 1930s.
Baedeker’s map of Odessa – delicately engraved in shades of yellow, ochre and black – from the 1892 edition of Russland.
The Blue Guides – both English and French – maintained the mapping traditions of their predecessors, albeit with less extravagance: the fold-outs were scaled back and their focus became more scholarly, with maps devoted principally to archeological sites and church plans. But the decades after the Second World War were a thin time for tourism and guidebooks, as an impoverished Europe holidayed largely at home. And for Baedeker, you might argue, the glory days had been those before the First World War. The novelist Jonathan Keates observed that a 1912 Baedeker from a town in south-eastern Europe boasted the Grand, the Europa and the Radetzky hotels, some old mosques, and some fine shops in the Appelkai selling carpets and inlaid metalwork. And then, two years later, a car carrying an Archduke passes along the same road in Sarajevo and is met by a man with a revolver, and ‘in the echo of the shots he fires we hear the portable paradise of Baedeker and Murray vanishing into air.’
Things were rather brighter for guidebooks and maps in post-war France, where the cartographic future was entrusted to the tyre company Michelin, whose maps and guides began in 1900 and flourished like no other. That’s because there was no other guidebook like them, nor any with maps with such a particular purpose. They began as a promotional wheeze to sell pneumatic tyres, sold as much to cyclists as motorists (in fact for the first few years the maps and books were given away free). Maps became central to the operation in 1910, guiding pleasure seekers to repair garages and petrol fill-ups, and increasingly to approved board and lodging (the three-star grading system, initially used for hotels with a restaurant, was introduced in 1931). Many pictograms in the guide and on the maps were esoteric, including a tilted shaded square indicating a hotel with a darkroom for photo developing, a scale of justice to indicate the availability of a solicitor after an accident, and a U-shaped mark to show where a driver may descend into a pit and get under the car.
In just over a decade there were Michelin guides and cartes not just for France but for large areas of Europe and beyond, cheering the motorist in Grande Bretagne, L’Espagne or Maroc towards engine oil and olive oil. The firm swiftly expanded into specialist maps, including, from 1917, unique Battleground Guides for pilgrimages to Verdun and elsewhere (marketed as un guide, un panorama, une histoire). And in the next war the maps served as an Allied tool, when the 1939 Michelin France was reprinted in Washington DC in 1944 and handed to the troops sweeping through Cherbourg and Bayeux as they liberated the country after D-Day.
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With many Europeans too impoverished to venture abroad in the post-war period, the Americans began to re-invent tourism, armed with their own new guides. Chief among these were the series invented by Eugene Fodor and Arthur Frommer.
Michelin’s numbered series – mapping France and beyond, and guiding the troops on D-Day.
Frommer served as a GI in mid-1950s Europe, where he compiled a budget guide for his fellow soldiers, itself a bargain at 50 cents. When he was discharged he beefed up the handbook for civilians, and Europe on $5 a Day was born. His no-nonsense, no-rip-off mentality appealed particularly to fellow Americans setting foot in Europe for the first time, and the series has run to more than fifty editions (though the prices obviously kept rising: by 1994 Paris would cost you $45 a day, while by 1997 New York was $70).
Eugene Fodor, born in Hungary, served in the war as an American soldier, although he had already written what he called his ‘Entertaining Travel Annual’ for Europe in 1936. His aim was twofold: to appeal to the American middle-classes with an eye on their purse, while also breezily expanding their cultural and historical horizons in a way he believed other guides were not – a less haughty, more flippant Murray for the ‘modern’ generation. But these new American guides, although much more informal than their Victorian-era, British predecessors, were in many ways far more conservative. They sent their readers on a narrowly-defined circuit of Europe, which comprised mainly the chief cities and sights. And their maps reflected this. The tinted, survey-style engravings of Murray or Baedeker, which you could have relied upon to ride across the continent, were replaced by crude sketches of city centres, noting the main attractions and hotels. All the art and detail of mapping had disappeared. It was as if guidebooks were ushering in a new dark age of cartography.
And by the 1970s, Fodor and Frommer had in their turn become very mainstream institutions, out of touch with a new wave of popular travel that followed in the wake of the hippies. Suddenly there was mass tourism again in Europe, much of it on a shoestring – hitchhiking or on ‘InterRail’ passes – as well as an opening up of places like India and Thailand, Mexico and Peru. The new wave soon spawned its own travel guides: the Australian-based Lonely Planet, which arrived with an overland guide to South East Asia in 1974, and the Rough Guides, which began covering Europe in 1982.
These two series presented a new attitude to tourism, although their readers would inevitably prefer to be thought of as travellers, and travellers with a conscience to boot. The guides were a little too efficient to be regarded as hippy, but they did have an authentic, back-to-the-earth mentality. Above all they would take you to parts of the world not yet spoilt by the other guides, and, if they were, would tell you where to go to meet like-minded travellers who wanted to do something about it (the first Rough Guide to Greece was dedicated to a non-nuclear future; eco-tourism is more the goal now.) They were written in a colloquial, chatty style, respectful of local customs but wary of officialdom, and their maps were reassuringly primitive. They were often hand-drawn out of necessity – both companies were shoestring operations in their early years and often the only map, say to a village in Nepal, was the one the guide’s researcher drew up on a napkin.
As Lonely Planets and Rough Guides developed, however, alongside other rival series (including a plethora in Germany), a respect for mapping re-emerged. It was like watching Murrays and Baedekers all over again. Lonely Planet would feature 100 maps in its India guide, Rough Guides would introduce a further fifty to towns not previously mapped since the Raj. In fact, as Rough Guides originator Mark Ellingham recalled, ‘we often used the old Murrays and Baedekers as our source material – nothing superior had been published since. It was just a question of adding new areas of the city and changing the street names. And, of course, introducing a rather different array of interests: local music clubs and bars and bike rental places, instead of the old Thomas Cook bureaux and poste restantes.’
The original Rough Guide to Greece, complete with a dark age map on the front.
The 1990s proved to be a golden age. Lonely Planet realised its aim to cover every country in the world, and did so in ever more detail and with growing sophisitication as digital mapping replaced hand-drawn, schematic plans. But the same digital mapping was also to hasten thir decline.
Then as the new millennium began, the bubble burst. Suddenly, all the world’s information was available on the Internet and, emboldened by cheap flights, and travelling often just for a few days, travellers did their research themselves. You might still buy a Rough Guide for a trip to Peru or Morocco, but for a few days in Italy or a weekend in Hungary you found your hotel through TripAdvisor and printed out a Google map. Or perhaps you had that Google map on your phone, allowing you to see not just the location of your hotel or intended sights, but yourself, a dot moving slowly towards them. In such a new world, why would anyone buy a book that was out of date the moment it was published?
But do we miss the graphite enchantment of those crinkly concertina engravings of Swiss mountains and Egyptian pyramids? I think we do.
A map is not like a well-pleated skirt; it does not readily return to the folds intended for it when you bought it. This realisation came to J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, when he was twenty-nine, and not yet famous. And why value Barrie’s opinions on maps? Because he wrote the simplest and most enchanting map direction in the world: ‘Second to the right and straight on till morning.’
That, at least, is how it appears in Barrie’s original play, first performed in 1904. When the Disney movie appeared in 1953, Peter’s directions had changed slightly (‘Second star to the right and straight on till morning’), and the studio also produced a map of Neverland (in associaton with Colgate) to chart the territory: Crocodile Creek, Pirate Cove, Skull Rock, and the rest. The thin paper map folded out to about 3ft by 2ft, and you needed three packs of soap and 15 cents to get one. It also had a heart-breaking inscription: ‘This map is a collector’s item of limited use.’
The map is unlikely to have pleased the dramatist. In September 1889, long before Peter Pan took his inaugural flight, Barrie took against maps in general. He was living in Edinburgh when he noticed a trend in bookshops along Princes Street. An assistant would frequently offer him a new map of the city while tying up his purchases.
The Colgate-Disney map of Neverland – tragically, ‘of limited use’.
‘Anything special about it?’ he would ask. ‘Well yes,’ the bookseller would reply. ‘It is very convenient for the pocket.’
‘At the words “convenient for the pocket” you ought to up with your books and run, for they are a danger signal,’ Barrie advised readers of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. ‘But you hesitate and are lost.’ Almost every house in Edinburgh contained a map that the whole family, working together, cannot shut, he went on. ‘What makes you buy it? In your heart you know you are only taking home a pocket of unhappiness.’ At the end of his diatribe, Barrie offers a list of negative advice born from terrible experience. This includes, ‘Don’t speak to the map’, ‘Don’t put your fist through it’, ‘Don’t kick it around the room’ and ‘Don’t blame your wife’. And if, by sheer fluke, you do succeed in folding the map, ‘don’t wave your arms in the air or go shouting all over the house “I’ve done it, I’ve done it!” If you behave in this way your elation will undo you, and no one will believe that you can do it again. Control yourself until you are alone.’
