BOOK OF TRAVELS TIPS SERIES

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. Her books, published by John Murray, served as a template for later guides. She also devised a system of !!! exclamation mark ratings, a forerunner of today's star ratings. 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 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. 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. Īn important transitional figure from the idiosyncratic style of the Grand Tour travelogues to the more informative and impersonal guidebook was Mariana Starke. Each volume gave information (geography, population, economy, history) on a country in Europe, Africa, the Near East or the Far East. īetween 16 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'. 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.

BOOK OF TRAVELS TIPS SERIES

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. 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. In the West, the guidebook developed from the published personal experiences of aristocrats who traveled through Europe on the Grand Tour. 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. The genre was called 'travel record literature' (youji wenxue), and was often written in narrative, prose, essay and diary style. Travel literature became popular during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) of medieval China. Some of the books claimed to be imbued with magic that could dispel the magical barriers believed to be protecting the artifacts. This was particularly the case in Arab Egypt, where treasure hunters were eager to find valuable ancient Egyptian antiquities. In the medieval Arab world, guide books for travelers in search of artifacts and treasures were written by Arabic treasure hunters, magicians, and alchemists. An early account is that of the pilgrim Egeria, who visited the Holy Land in the 4th century CE and left a detailed itinerary.

With the advent of Christianity, the guide for the European religious pilgrim became a useful guidebook. 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. An early 'remarkably well-informed and interesting guidebook' was the Hellados Periegesis ( Descriptions of Greece) of Pausanias of the 2nd century A.D. 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. A lost work by Agaclytus describing Olympia ( περὶ Ὀλυμπίας) is referred to by the Suda and Photius. The periegesis, or 'progress around' was an established literary genre during the Hellenistic age. It served the same purpose as the later Roman itinerarium of road stops. This work was possibly written in the middle of the 1st century CE.

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. A Japanese tourist consulting a tour guide and a guide book from Akizato Ritō's Miyako meisho zue (1787) Antiquity Ī forerunner of the guidebook was the periplus, an itinerary from landmark to landmark of the ports along a coast.

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