Riveting morsels: the lure of the guidebook
“A guidebook is a good reflection of the age in which it is written"
I wrote about the gravity of over-zealously getting rid of books in a previous newsletter, Why you should not get rid of books, and thought I’d return to the topic as I was doing some reshelving this week and came across my copy of McGraw-Hill’s 1955 Pocket Travel Guide to Spain.
Old guide books are often a bit undervalued, but they are fascinating (pictured above is ). In Notting Hill Edition’s The Portable Paradise by Jonathan Keates, he writes about his collection of vintage guidebooks that “whether as professional historians or as everyday readers anxious for a closer walk with the past, we do wrong in ignoring these books as valid witnesses of their own era.” These feelings are echoed in the Literary Review where Sarah Anderson reviewing Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook by Nicholas T Parsons points out that: “A guidebook is a good reflection of the age in which it is written: how people travel, why they travel, where they go and what they do when they get there are all riveting morsels of social history.”
This is certainly true of this little beauty. Wisely avoiding too much discussion of recent history and politics, McGraw-Hill’s 1955 Pocket Travel Guide to Spain clings to the romantic notion of a Spain untouched by the works of modernity, “a nation which through the centuries has changed only in outward appearances …Madrid’s skyscrapers still do not give an American aspect…something still remains of the Madrid of past centuries, even if it is only the look of the young girls who seem to have escaped from a picture by Goya.”
But the preface emphasises that a new type of visitor to Spain has arrived for which a new type of guidebook is necessary. “Modern, streamlined, concise for today’s tourist,” the book boasts on the front, and inside that it is for those, “in a hurry, for their annual holidays last only three or four weeks.” But McGraw Hill is sure of its market, people who, “love new things and every year this thirst for novelty drives them in ever-increasing numbers along the roads of all countries…they are ‘motorized’ and they all, from riders of power-assisted bicycles and scooters up to drivers of big cars, show the same craving for independence and freedom of action…the authors well appreciate that just because you are a tourist, you won’t suddenly turn into an archaeologist.”
This breezy approach leaves no time to examine the country in depth but it focuses on the big draws. Bullfighting, for example, is described as “not a sport but a ballet of death” (the guide also reports disappointedly that the toreros relaxing in their regular watering hole, the Golden Lion in Madrid’s Calle de Alcala, “are not very picturesque off duty”). Elsewhere it drifts dangerously close to purple prose territory, Castile offering “vast bare plains, earth or stone-coloured villages in which stand a gem of Roman church-building, ruined castles on rocky heights or set down like islands in a sea of wheat, men and women of mild, lean appearance, impervious to sun or icy wind.
This romantic image of the country is particularly noticeable in the Andalucia sections. By the 1950s the region had been the most popular region among tourists for centuries and writers and travellers such as Washington Irving and Prosper Mérimée, author of Carmen, had built up its stereotypical image of a fiesta-loving culture full of flashing-eyed señoritas, flamencos and castanets. The guidebook merrily enlightens the reader that:
“A foreigner visiting Andalucia for the first time has two prejudices which do not actually conform to reality. The people, it is believed, are lazy, but despite the climate, which makes all exertion painful, these people cultivate the soil with care, develop industry, and maintain their artistic and intellectual life at a high level for which they have always been noted. The Andalucian, in plain language, is not a slave to work which, like wealth, is not his main aim in life. He finds life pleasant, and tries to avoid anything which interferes with his full enjoyment of it.”
What is particularly intriguing about the McGraw-Hill guide is the section on statistics. It estimates that there is only one bicycle to every 25 people, one car to 133, one wireless set to 8, and one telephone to 34. Television, it emphasises, has not yet been introduced in Spain, and there are few washing machines or refrigerators. And if appreciation of the Spanish countryside has also undergone a revolution (the guide gleefully points out that the Spanish ibex, bear, wolves and eagles can all be hunted), how much more the capital’s nightlife where “before the civil war Madrid had a hectic nightlife which today has almost entirely disappeared …the streets are deserted by 2 o’clock in the morning. 15 years ago the Calle de Alcala and the Puerta del Sol were filled with people until dawn.”
I can’t say I look at this guidebook regularly, but I’m pleased to keep it on my shelves and you never know how useful it might be in the future. It’s a keeper.