Baedeker in the Making

IT would be interesting, but undoubtedly difficult, to trace the stream of guidebooks to its original source. Such slight researches as I have made seem to indicate that possibly Baedeker, like so many other good things, may have had a Semitic origin. At any rate, the Prophet Isaiah (xxxv, 8) wrote of something the object of which, to use his own words as given in the Authorized Version, was to insure that “wayfaring men, though fools, should not err therein.” If this was not a guidebook, I do not know what it was. It is not stated that a system of starring entered into the Prophet’s plan; but we have good evidence that stars were used for guidance in very early times. Sic itur ad astra has always been regarded as a respectable motto; and there are more ways than one of hitching one’s wagon to a star. Omitting Herodotus, who would probably be voted as altogether too entertaining to pass as a progenitor of Baedeker, we come to Pausanias, who, in the second century of our era, wrote a careful itinerary of Greece, still sometimes used as a guide by Harvard professors and other learned travelers. Some might assert that the description given of his work by one authority might have been penned of Baedeker himself. “His style is unpretentious and easy, although devoid of any literary grace, but his Itinerary possesses the rare merit of being the work of an honest and accurate eyewitness. . . . His observations seldom rise out of the prosaic atmosphere proper to the catalogue.” Later, and especially after the invention of printing, numerous books were published under such titles as Viatorium or Itinerarium ; but few, if any, of these could be called guidebooks in the modern sense. Coryat’s Crudities Hastily Gobbled up in Five Months Travels in France, Italy, etc., is a curious account of a walking tour made about 1610; but its title alone is, I hope, enough to show that it was not conceived in the spirit of Baedeker. Coryat was, however, ahead of his time in considering travel “the sweetest and most delightful of all the pleasures in the world;” and he also deserves credit for withstanding the ridicule to which he was exposed on his return to England for using a new-fangled and finicking implement called a fork, which he had picked up in Italy. The Itinerary of Fynes Moryson (1617), though it undertakes to give “each daies expences for diet, horse meat, and the like,” can hardly be regarded as a practical guidebook. It was first written in Latin, and then translated into English. Howell’s Instructions for Forreine Travel, published in 1642, was “intended as a cautionary guide to young English gentlemen who went abroad to complete their education and to make their first acquaintance with foreign manners.” When I say, however, that it includes an apology for episcopacy, a survey of foreign politics, and “a large discourse of the strange difference ’twixt the disposition of the French and Spaniard,” it will be evident that it is not laid down exactly on Baedekerian lines. J. G. Ebel’s Anleitung, for Switzerland, published in 1793, makes an approach to modern methods by including one or two small maps, but is for the rest an alphabetical gazetteer in four volumes, prefixed by sundry edifying moral essays. About the beginning of the nineteenth century various works were published by Mrs. Mariane Starke, William Boyce, and others, all having many features of the guidebook.

To John Murray of London, however, belongs the honor of publishing the first true guidebook in the modern sense. On this point I cannot do better than quote from a letter written by Herr Fritz Baedeker to the London Times in 1889:

“I wish to acknowledge, in the frankest manner, that Mr. Murray was the first publisher of guidebooks on a large scale. After the terrible wars which devastated the Continent at the beginning of this century, Great Britain was, indeed, the only country in Europe where wealth enough remained to allow of any large section of the public indulging freely in foreign travel.

“My father, Karl Baedeker (born 1801, died 1859), had, it is true, on his settlement at Coblenz in 1827, purchased and published a handbook to the Rhine in German and French (Rheinreise von Mainz bis Koln, von Professor S. A. Klein, Coblenz, 1828, and Voyage du Rhin, de Mayence à Cologne, Coblenz, 1829) which possessed many of the features of a modern guidebook; but it was the sight of the numerous English travellers following the footsteps of Childe Harold, with Murray’s handbook under their arms, that suggested to him the desirability of providing his German countrymen with similar books for other parts of Europe. The German handbooks which he then successively published (Belgien und Holland, Deutschland, Schweiz) certainly owed a great deal to Mr. Murray’s books, but included many descriptions of his own, and in the important practical points (recommendations of hotels, information as to means of communication, etc.) were completely independent. . . .

“The later handbooks published by my father and those published by my elder brothers and myself are perfectly independent works, produced with the aid of able helpers, many of whom are eminent scholars and specialists.”

Murray’s Handbook for Holland, Belgium, and N. Germany appeared in 1836. Herr Baedeker’s first English handbook was that to The Rh ine, published in 1861, and based on the eleventh German edition. The early English issues of Baedeker’s handbooks were edited by Mr. John Kirkpatrick, long Professor of Constitutional Law and History at the University of Edinburgh.

Before passing on to notice Baedeker more particularly, I may remind the reader that the roll of writers of avowed guidebooks includes such distinguished names as William Wordsworth and Harriet Martineau, each of whom wrote a guidebook for the English Lake District. James Ford’s Handbook to Spain, written for Murray in 1845, has, perhaps, won for itself a higher reputation than any other single work published under the rubric of guidebooks, and has often been referred to as a classic of its kind. My criticism on this would be that, though a charming book to read, this is not an absolutely ideal guidebook, properly socalled; and, if you will substitute the word “practical” for the word “ideal” in this phrase, you will, strangely enough, get almost exactly the same meaning. That this opinion is probably correct is borne out by the fact that Ford’s book, originally published in two volumes, was very soon reduced to one, while a delightful little book of travel-impressions, entitled Gatherings from, Spain, was made out of the matter eliminated from the guidebook. This reflection brings me to what may, perhaps, be considered the distinguishing characteristic of Baedeker, namely, that he was probably the first to formulate to himself, fully and clearly, the fundamental difference between a book of travels and a guidebook. The former is meant for the delectation of the stay-at-home, who wants a picturesque and moderately true account of places he may never set eyes upon. The guidebook, on the other hand, is for use on the spot, and does not need to tell the traveler what he will see for himself. Hence its descriptions are often, of good right, less logically complete than those of the book of travels, and it would be simply impertinence for it. to indulge in the enthusiasm which is welcome enough in a Stanley or a Sven Hedin. Baedeker shows that he thinks a place worth mentioning because he tells you how to get there; he will even, if he loses his head a little, give it a star; but the rest he leaves to the idiosyncrasy of the beholder. This self-imposed limitation has sometimes — wrongly, as I think — been made a reproach to Baedeker, and his text has been unfavorably compared with the quotable anecdotes and glowing descriptions of a Martineau or a Ford ; but it should at least be put on record that he feels his withers quite unwrung by any such strictures, and has no envy of prize-winners in a competition he has never entered.

Perhaps another discovery of Baedeker’s was that it is not the man of wealth alone who likes to travel. Previous guidebooks all assumed, more or less, the paraphernalia of a coach-and-four, couriers, and ministerial introductions. Baedeker recognized the right of “ the merry heart ” to “go all the day,” however slender its wallet. Hence his desire to “render the traveller as nearly as possible independent of hotel keepers, commissionaires, and guides;” hence his long array of “unpretending” inns; hence his references to the “faulty mental arithmetic of waiters;" hence his innumerable hints to help the tourist to “husband his resources,” and his repeated warnings that “prices generally have an upward tendency.” He has not, however, with all his pains, succeeded in making his calculations for the economical traveler with such praiseworthy exactitude as Mr. James Flint, a thrifty Scot, who visited the United States about 1820, and set down in his journal: “ For some days past I have found the expense of travelling to be uniformly three shillings eleven pence and one farthing per day.”¹

A third important, characteristic, and (I think) generally recognized new feature in Baedeker was the number and excellence of his maps and plans. A good map or plan, prepared with real Teutonic thoroughness, saves many a line of description; and in criticising Baedeker’s written style, it should be remembered that his maps should often he regarded as an integral part of his text. No doubt Baedeker is no longer alone in this department of guidebook making, but I think it is undeniable that he was a pioneer in it, and it may not be too much to assert that the equipment of his books in this respect has seldom been equaled, and never excelled.

Among the minor features that distinguished Baedeker from previous guidebooks may be mentioned his use of varying types to indicate the relative importance of the points treated, his uniform segregation of practical information about hotels and so forth at the beginning of his description of a place, and his employment of asterisks as “marks of commendation.” A good deal of fun — seldom of the most expensive variety — has been poked at the Baedekerian stars, and it has often been alleged that in questions of art they are concerned with merely obvious and commonplace merit. Even if this were true, — which I am far from admitting, for it. seems to me that the man whose artistic taste was accurately gauged by the stars of Baedeker might hold his head fairly high among connoisseurs of art, — the real educational value of the stars would still be considerable. If the simple “star-gazer” is at first impelled solely by submission to authority, he may yet, by much familiarity with what is generally recognized as good of its kind, attain a fair measure of real taste and discrimination. The stars ought at any rate to wean the traveler from chromos, and undermine his faith in the supreme value of Rogers’s domestic statuary.

1 Early Western Travels, vol. 9.

Some one has asserted that Baedeker is the most widely read of living authors; and perhaps this is not so far from the truth when we reflect that he has issued upwards of seventy handbooks, all of which are in constant use. Of these twenty-seven are in German, twentyfour in English,and twenty-two in French. The earliest, as already noted, was the Rheinreise, published in 1828; the very latest is the Handbook to Constantinople and Asia Minor, issued just the other day, and not yet translated into English. The task attempted in these seventy volumes is somewhat formidable. Francis Bacon mentions three essentials for a young man who desires “to put his travel into a little room, and in short time to gather much.” “First, he must have some entrance to the language before he goeth. Then he must have such a servant or tutor as knoweth the country.” Third, “let him carry with him also some card or book describing the country where he travelleth, which will be a good key to his enquiry,” Baedeker essays all three of these functions. Indeed, if you will rightly consider it, you will easily see that few men are called upon for a more varied equipment than the Ideal Baedeker, who has practically to take all knowledge for his province, or to whom, to put it more mildly, no knowledge can come amiss. Not for him, alas, is the dear luxury of saying, “I know nothing about it, and care less;” he dare not be happy in the general ignorance which forms so comfortable a wrappage for the special knowledge of other men. Willy-nilly, he must take omniscience for his foible. Of many a row of serried facts would he gladly say with Goethe, “Entbehren sol1st du, sollst entbehren;” but when it comes to the pinch of selection, there is hardly one of them but shows the earmark of some conceivable tourist, and Baedeker, “dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing,” can but address himself to the task of bearing each parcel to its destination.

Among the most obvious, the most elementary requirements for the equipment of an ideal editor of guidebooks are a knowledge of geography, history, mythology, botany, geology, languages (ancient and modern), painting, sculpture, art, architecture, and archæology; an acute and discriminating taste; a clear head in foreseeing and explaining the complications of travel; and a sympathetic insight into the needs and desires of the average tourist. The mere enumeration shows how impossible it is for one small head to carry all this load; but it is almost necessary to have at least so much knowledge in all these branches as will insure sound discrimination among competing authorities.

Baedeker has to know, and know well, the kind of geography that we all learn more or less in our classrooms. It is, however, highly desirable that he should also be familiar with the geography of the world of poesy and romance in which most of us spend so much of our time long after classroom days are over. To many travelers the scene of Poor Jo’s death is at least as real as the place where the Little Princes were smothered; and it would be a bold as well as a bad Baedeker who should conduct us through the Trossachs of Scotland without calling up the shades of Ellen and of Roderick Dhu. There are, I verily believe, many travelers to whom Lyme Regis is simply the place where Louisa Elliot sprained her ankle, and not at all the place where the Duke of Monmouth landed before Sedgemoor. The Wessex of Thomas Hardy, the Barchester and Allington of Anthony Trollope, have their devout pilgrims. He who could pilot us safely from point to point in Rosalind’s Forest of Arden would probably be hailed with at least as much enthusiasm as he who guides us through the Ardennes of the seven-day tripper from London; and there ought to be no forgiveness for the guidebook that allows us to pass through Verona without reminding us that it possessed a balcony as well as an amphitheatre. For the maker of guidebooks the opportunity of thus bringing the actual and the fancied worlds into contact is one of the most grateful parts of his task; it affords even him the chance of a glimpse through

In strong distinction to this imaginative realm is the mass of dry practical details about hotels and railways, health and passports, currency and bicycling, that the head of a really adequate Baedeker is bound to contain. He must be familiar with the comparative merits of inns over a great part of the known world. Statistics should be as play to him, and the mysteries of agio and exchange should be as clear to him as day. He must be able to discriminate at a glance “between those trains in Bradshaw which start somewhere and get nowhere and those which start nowhere and get somewhere.” He must know to a hair’s breadth the distance from a German or Russian fortress within which the use of a kodak is as dangerous as a boomerang. He must be able to say whether or no a clinkerpaved road is good for cycling, and that the Swiss passes are closed to automobiles. But it is unnecessary to multiply instances of this kind, which every traveler can supply for himself.

The demands made on the moral side of the ideal Baedeker are no less stringent than those on the intellectual. That a guidebook-writer should hold the scales with absolute evenness between his patron, the tourist, on the one side, and the hosts of landlords, guides, and hirers on the other may be assumed as obvious. That the actual Baedeker has attained a fair measure of impartiality may be inferred from the witness of generations of tourists, and from such epithets as “abnormally neutral,” “bloodless,” “wooden,” and “stony” flung at him by the rising gorge of the partial natural man. Baedeker stands before the footlights not to express emotions, but to chronicle facts; the fierce light that beats upon his head would soon shrivel any tendency to favoritism. It is possible, however, that even Baedeker might enjoy a fuller expression of his own personality, and that, if he has had success in attaining a somewhat colorless catholicity of taste and interest, it has been the result of carefully disciplined effort toward a judicially selected goal.

Herbert Spencer relates in his Autobiography how near he came to serious disaster on a long and solitary walk in the Scottish Highlands, owing to the imperfection of the map to which he trusted for guidance. He then opines, with characteristic love of generalization, “that from time to time lives are lost, and every year many illnesses caused by the misdirection” of guidebooks. While hoping that Spencer took a needlessly gloomy view, we must admit that a profound sense of responsibility is another essential of the guidebook-maker as he should be. I have no hesitation in claiming this quality for Baedeker. He is, for example, keenly aware of the difference between feats that may fairly be attempted with a good guidebook, good health, and good weather, and those which cry imperatively for local knowledge and a living guide. If the carriers of the little red-garbed books ever come to grief on the mountains, it is probably because they have neglected, if not the Baedekerian shout of “guide indispensable,” then at least the Baedekerian whisper of “guide desirable.” Indeed, in the sphere of responsibility, Baedeker is possibly open to the charge of taking himself almost too seriously, and of assuming that every traveler will do exactly as he is told. Even in the matter of sea-bathing, he is careful to impose on his Teutonic reader the rule of “three dips and out,” though this somewhat grandmotherly attitude is not always extended to his British and American clients. Baedeker’s sense of responsibility is, of course, manifest in the mass of small details he offers for the traveler’s use in every imaginable contingency; and for those behind the scenes it is visible in the mountain of at least equal bulk heaped up of siftings and rejections. Another manifestation of the seriousness with which Baedeker faces his task is his liberal recourse to weighty authorities in the preparation of his handbooks. He docs not venture to impose his own tastes in art, his own rules of health, his own ideas of science on the unsuspecting traveler; but tries to secure in each case the cooperation of leading specialists and recognized authorities.

Those who insist so glibly on the “dryas-dust” quality of Baedeker probably forget too much the character of the reader for whom he caters. The novelist, the poet, or the essayist has before his mind’s eye as he writes the ideal sympathetic reader to whom he can pour out his soul without fear of misunderstanding. Hence it is that some men write so much better than they talk; the visionary reader is so much less paralyzing than any incarnation of him. But the selfdenying ordinance of a Baedeker couples idealism of effort with renunciation of an ideal type of reader; he has, for the most part, to cater for the average tourist, and even, at times, for the wayfaring man as characterized by Isaiah. Though he shares the privilege, enjoyed by the author over the painter or actor, of not coming into direct personal contact with any particular Brown, Jones, or Robinson, he is yet debarred from ascribing exceptional qualities to the general form of his client. His eye must tend, on the whole, to fix itself on the weaker links of the touristic chain. His sympathy may not rest with the man who seeks the bubble of statistics even amid the majesty of St. Peter’s, but he has to satisfy his cravings all the same. His educational influence would be lost if his guns were trained too high; he must bear in mind that practically every innocent demand of the traveler deserves attention. The man who thinks that Pallas and Athena are entirely different personages is not a wholly negligible quantity; it may even be that a truer sense of the beautiful lurks in his breast than in that of many a learned pedant. Montaigne scoffed at those travelers who are “disconcerted by forms unlike their own,” and “travel shut up and locked up, with a taciturn and unsocial prudence, defending themselves from the contagion of an unknown atmosphere;” but it is just such men as this that Baedeker has often to consider and if possible help to acquire Montaigne’s own attitude of always “thrusting himself in at the tables thickest with strangers.” ²

Baedeker must be at once scholar and sportsman, bon-vivant and botanist, archæologist and theatre-goer. He must at one time shiver with the novice on the brink of the most insignificant precipice; at another he must stand steady-headed on the loftiest peaks along with the fearsome race of “adepts” who stalk through his Switzerland and Eastern Alps. In a book intended for the seafaring Briton he must not be overawed by the fact that there are sixty-eight steamers in the merchant fleet of Belgium, nor must he expect a resident of the Rocky Mountains to grow dizzy at sight of the sandhills of Vrouwenheide, the highest point in Holland. The German professor must not be allowed to stumble on a sentence mentioning Noah Porter of Yale in the same breath with Kant or Hegel; and a chastening memory of Lincoln and Chartres must control the description of the cathedral of Albany, New York. The ideal Baedeker must never mistake geese — scenic, historical, literary, or otherwise — for swans. He must be at once a student of nature, of art, and of man. His sense of proportion should amount to an artistic gift.

In going on now to give a few lines about the actual modus operandi in the production of a guidebook, it is, perhaps, not letting too large a cat out of the bag to say that each successive head of the multiple personality known as Baedeker has regarded himself as an author as well as a publisher, and has looked for his reward in reputation as much as in pelf. To be styled the “King of Guidebook Makers” by an important authority excites, perhaps, as pleasant a throb as an increasing sale; and certain volumes have been issued rather from a desire of rounding out the series than from any hope of gain. It is highly probable that no other firm could show so inverted a ratio of reputation and revenue as that of Karl Baedeker. Few books, other than elaborate éditions de luxe, can be so expensive to produce as the modest little red handbooks of Baedeker. To begin with, they are not stereotyped, but are kept permanently standing in type, — a locking up of capital of which every expert will recognize the significance. The object of this is to reduce to a minimum the temptation of letting a thing stand “because it is there.” Practically the smallest shadow of an excuse for a change is seized upon. If it has been ascertained since the last edition that ten per cent more tourists now travel From B to A instead of from A to B, this is enough to make the almost quixotic Baedekerian pen turn the route round and rewrite it from beginning to end. Baedeker s rule of refusing all advertisements is well known. The object of this is not only to avoid any suspicion of partiality — conscious or unconscious — to the hotel that pays for a long advertisement, but also to insure that the book will always depend for its profits on its freshness and other merits, and not in any degree on the returns of advertisements. Another reason is to diminish the bulk of the volume, and so avoid the course which makes the ordinary American magazine a weariness of the flesh, whatever it may be to the spirit. The maps and plans are another source of expense, as are likewise the monographs by special writers and the traveling expenses of the editors. The short life of each new edition also differentiates the Baedekers from other successful books, where the rate of profit increases with the increase of sale. This is true of the Baedekers to a limited extent only. After a few years at most each handbook is so thoroughly overhauled as to be practically a new book both in form and cost of production. I should gladly give any one a dollar for every unaltered page in a new edition of Baedeker who would give me a cent for each page containing a change. A guidebook is a book that, from the necessity of the case, is always in the making, and never made. It can never be laid aside as done, with nothing more to do but to sell. Hence small impressions, constant corrections, and fast-following new editions are indispensable for worthy achievement.

It is, of course, well known that the term Baedeker, as generally used, covers the work of a number of different editors and contributors, whose names are not always mentioned. That this is an inevitable and perfectly just arrangement — a fair application of the dictum “qui facit per aliutn facit per se " — seems clear to me, mainly on these grounds: (1) the whole scheme of the books, the framework which the various editors have to fill in, was the invention and device of the elder Baedeker: (2) the head of the firm continues to take a personal and intelligent interest in the preparation of every handbook in the series; and (3) the share played by the publishers’ capital. in facilitating travel and investigation, furnishes the actual writer with a large proportion of his material. Half the work is really done before the editors touch their pens. The various individual editors have a chance to exercise a good deal of art in conforming to the uniform style of the handbooks; and that this is not, perhaps, so easy as it looks has been borne witness to by the perennial difficulty of getting usable matter from outsiders, even of wide cultivation and considerable literary gift. I do not believe any editor has more trouble in recasting his “copy” than the editor of a really carefully prepared guidebook. There is no field in which the need of le mot juste is more imperatively indicated.

The composite photograph labeled Baedeker, however, takes in more than the editorial staff, — it also includes many of the travelers who use the handbooks ; the reader of to-day becomes one of the authors of to-morrow. A good guidebook does not spring, like Minerva, fully grown from the head of its parent. Unlike a poet, it is not born, but “becomes;” like a snow-ball, erescit eundo. It is open to question whether a combination of the largest capital and the most brilliant genius could produce, at the first go-off. so good a guidebook for any country as one backed by much more slender resources, which has yet enjoyed the voluntary coöperation of travelers through various successive editions. The data sent to Baedeker vary from recommendations of some particularly plump headwaiter up to corrections on important points of scholarship and fact, and highly valuable suggestions for improvement. One laborious gentleman, I remember, not content with our already voluminous index of four or five thousand entries, sent us a complete new index with more than twice as many. On the whole, however, the help offered by travelers is as satisfactory in quality as it is bulky in quantity; and almost the first thing to be done in preparing a new edition is a careful examination of the letters in the pigeon-hole of the particular handbook under treatment. Actual cases of misinformation from this source are rare; but the editor must boon his guard against the unintentional bias of letters due to the exceptionally good or bad treatment of the writer, and he must be still more careful to detect bogus or interested letters, and to discount the self-praise of hotel-keepers and the like. The pessimist should take note that we receive at least as many letters of praise as of blame; the chronic grumbler is not more in evidence than the traveler of content. After the letters of travelers comes an equally careful Study of newspaper cuttings, census bulletins, railway literature, annual reports of all kinds, magazine articles, and topographical works that have appeared since the last edition of the handbook. This done, the editor is ready to take to the road and collect his own material on the spot. It is, of course, impracticable for him to travel over a whole country for each new issue, though this is indispensable in preparing a first edition; but be can at least visit that section which seems to have undergone most change, and so manage to go over the whole ground again in the course of a few years. For the parts he does not visit he receives his information by deputy or from local residents; and it is an unusually easy job that does not involve in this way the writing of hundreds of letters, and the asking of thousands of questions.

All the mechanical work of the Baedeker handbooks, including the printing, map-making, and binding, is done in Germany, most of it in Leipsic, where the firm has been established since 1872. Before that its seat was at Coblenz. The connection of the Baedeker family with the book-trade goes back to Diederich Baedeker, who died at Bielefeld in 1716 as königlich-preussicher priviligierter Buchdrucker. Since his day there has been an unbroken line of printing or publishing Baedekers, forming a good example of that honorable commercial heredity so difficult to parallel out of Germany.

The acute reader will have noticed long ere this that the term Baedeker is used in these pages, not only as the name of a personality or system, but often as equivalent to guidebook, — perhaps, at times (with some natural and possibly excusable partiality) as synonymous with “good guidebook.” There is legal warrant for this identification. Some years ago a sapient tribunal in Berlin decided that “Baedeker” meant guidebook, and that consequently we had no redress against a rival publisher who annually issued what he chose to call a Berliner Baedeker. This robbery of one’s good name was the more vexatious inasmuch as it also involved a considerable encroachment on what the high-minded dramatist dismissed as “trash.” Some years ago, too, the German visitor to New York could buy a New York Baedeker which had nothing to do with the Leipsic house of that name; and the Spaniard may visit the Argentine to-day under the ægis of a “ Baedeker de la Republica Argentina, por Alberto B. Martinez.” More exalted regions than any the real owner of the name has presumed to tackle have been treated in a work entitled Der Himmels-Baedeker; but this, if my memory serves, is a kind of satirico-sociological drama, owing its inspiration at least as much to Faust as to Baedeker. Baedeker has also been used as the title of a German farce, the plot of which rests on the wiles of an impecunious traveler who succeeds in living at hack and manger by passing himself off as an agent of the “Brick-red Incorruptible,” a feat which, it may be hoped, many generations of warning prefaces have now made impossible. This drawing of Baedeker into the realm of humor seems at first sight just a little incongruous; and doubtless most of the humor of his guidebooks is of the unintentional order. Thus one reviewer congratulated us on our felicity of phrase in describing a statue of Venus, as consisting of “undressed stone.” The laughable element in the description of the American chicken as a fowl of any age was also, I fear, entirely unpremeditated, as the reference was mainly to such terms as chicken-coop and chicken-farm, where the English say hen-coop and poultryfarm, and was in no degree intended as a slur on the table qualities of the youthful American hen. I notice that the anonymous author of Le Guide Français auxEtats Unis also considers it necessary to explain that “chicken” in America is used “an lieu de fowl, en Angleterre.” Since the preparation of the glossary in which this word occurs, I have found that another American equivalent for rooster is “he-bird;” this is a point where Baedeker has missed a chance of being funny. Many commentators find food for merriment in the absolute confidence shown by certain travelers in Baedeker’s guidance, and in their refusal to admire anything unmarked by a Baedekerian asterisk. The Münchener Fliegende Blätter represents an English paterfamilias as exclaiming to his flock, “This scenery is all wrong” (“Diese Gegend ist falsch”), when he finds the picturesque castle to the right and the foaming waterfall to the left, instead of vice versâ, as asserted by his infallible guide. A writer has hazarded the theory that the average German’s love for nature is explained by the fact that it contains so many restaurants; and the frequent collocation of “beer and fine view” in the German editions of Baedeker might seem to lend color to the hypothesis. The unconscious humors of the English editions of Baedeker are often due to the vagaries of an inexperienced translator or the struggles of a German compositor with a manuscript in an unknown tongue. Fortunately most of this humor is reserved for the editorial eye alone; and if any of it has managed to escape into the published volumes, wild horses would not extort from me a confession of the fact. I once found myself wondering whether the most converted of Benedicts would be willing to face the creature strangely described in my proof as a “five-arched bride.” On another occasion I wrote of a “room full of plaster casts,” which was returned to me in proof as a “room full of blasted cats!” These casts seem predestined as a Baedekerian stumblingblock, for one lady, trying to help us at a pinch, translated the French word moulages as “ mill - machinery : ” and when the same phrase recurred a little lower down translated it as “more millmachinery,” in mild and helpless wonderment over the eccentricity of the directors of French musées, who mingled Millets and machinery in the same room. It was reserved for the same gifted lady to discover what had for years mysteriously escaped our notice: namely, that Une Marine was obviously the feminine of un marin, and was consequently to be translated as “a seafaring woman.” In the proof of the recent French edition of Baedeker’s United States, a small part of which was tentatively translated by a novice, I found the Newport readingroom masquerading as the Hippodrome (that is, riding-room) de Newport, and had to check the curiously perverted ingenuity which translated “Newsboys’ Lodging House” as Créche des enfants trouvés, apparently intended as a free and idiomatic rendering of “new boys.” A man who has written more than one work of his own on a certain country was once called in to help us with one of our handbooks. His vein of originality was, however, so marked that we felt it would unduly overshadow the prosaic truthfulness of our other handbooks, and we had consequently to consign his manuscript — regretfully — to the waste-paper basket. Dozens of his improvements on the German text he was asked to translate might be given; but one will suffice. The contents of a certain glass case in a museum were described as interessante Zeugproben, that is, samples of stuff or textiles; this appeared in his manuscript as “interesting trials by witness.” I think Baedeker would have shown even more than his usual sobriety of tone if he had confined himself to the epithet “interesting” for a trial carried on in so limited and stuffy a courtroom. Miss A. Goodrieh-Freer, in her recent charming book on Inner Jerusalem, writes “that an early edition of Murray’s Guide appeared with the motto, ‘The Bible is the best guidebook to Palestine,’ and that the ensuing Baedeker retorted with, ‘Palestine is the best guidebook to the Bible.’” This instance of voluntary humor must, for the present, be left to rest on Miss Freer’s authority.

The late Lord Chief Justice Russell of England once delivered a judicial ruling to the effect that it was not enough for a publisher of guidebooks to give a mere list of hotels, but that it was also his duty to make such discrimination as would aid the traveler in his selection. Baedeker’s loyal attempts to identify himself in this way with the interests of the users of his handbooks has sometimes exposed him to attacks of a more formidable kind than letters of correction and complaint. At one time his books were kept out of France until he had paid a considerable sum as a solatium to a hotel-keeper in Nancy, who felt aggrieved by the words “complained of” (on s’en plaint) attached to the name of his hotels. A similar suit, which was ultimately won by Baedeker, was recently brought against him by another hotel-keeper in Naples. The gravamen in this case was that the hotel was described as pour hommes seuls, which was, curiously enough, regarded as a slur on its character. Our avvocato on that occasion, in the peroration of his eloquent, not to say flowery, address to the court, applied to Baedeker’s “persecuted guidebook” the lines applied by Dante to Fortune: “This is she who is so set upon the cross, even by those who ought to give her praise, giving her blame amiss and ill report.” The Neapolitan Chamber of Commerce protested angrily against such “lies, insults,and defamations”in Baedeker as the statements that begging is rather common in Italy, that the rifling of trunks in the baggage-car is not wholly unknown on that classic soil, that the heat of Naples is oppressive in September, and that the popular idea of cleanliness in South Italy is still sadly to seek. Recent newspaper reports assert that the native druggists of Rome have formed a combination to take legal proceedings against the infamous foreigner who has dared to recommend his readers to prefer the stores kept by British or American chemists. A native of Malta, of Syrian parentage and swarthy skin, considered himself injured by the statements that he was an Arab, that his real name was Awwad and not Howard, and that bargaining was advisable at his, as at all the other hotels in Joppa. Posing as a British subject unrighteously assailed by the objectionable Teuton, this gentleman succeeded in winning a verdict from a patriotic and impressionable British jury, in spite of the fact that the judge’s summing up pointed the other way, and included an enunciation of the principle referred to at the beginning of this paragraph. It is, however, satisfactory to add that, very soon after the verdict, the plaintiff in the case offered to forego his damages if Baedeker would reinstate his hotels in the guidebook; while it takes an almost more Christian spirit than I can boast to refrain from rejoicing that the hotels thus retired from Baedeker had also in two or three years to retire from business altogether. An experience like this makes Baedeker feel that he has not shed his blood in vain, and that even a wrongheaded British jury cannot prevent him from offering some degree of protection to his clients.

Attacks of a somewhat different kind occasionally, also, leave a taste that is not wholly of bitterness. Some time ago a distinguished art critic — for whom, in his chosen sphere, I have nothing but bated breath and bended knee — wrote to Baedeker to complain that the ascription (in our Handbook to Italy) of certain paintings to certain masters had been borrowed without acknowledgment from a recently published work of his own. The matter was referred to me, and I had the pleasure of finding out that the indicted sentence had first appeared in an edition of Baedeker published when the distinguished critic was of an age when he could not have known the difference between a Botticelli and a Bouguereau. I confess it was with a good deal of what the Germans untranslatably call Schadenfreude, that I informed our assailant that “if there had been any borrowing in the case — which I was far from asserting — it was not Baedeker who was the borrower.”

To the two main distinguishing features of Baedeker mentioned at the beginning of this paper, it. seeins to me that a third might be added in the form of a claim that he was the first writer of guidebooks to discover that not every Englishspeaking tourist is born in the British Isles. He takes care to mention points of special interest to Americans, such as the original home of the Washingtons, the Mayflower tablet at Plymouth, and Benjamin Franklin’s London lodgings. He realizes that the American has as much right to be interested in the exploits of Paul Jones as the Englishman in those of Blake; and he tries to remember that a too insular enthusiasm over a British victory will not specially appeal to a transatlantic reader. More than that, he realizes that English and American are rather sister-dialects than identical tongues, and not only explains English phrases that might puzzle the American, but even adopts American expressions which seem to him desirable. The American tourist whom the ordinary English guidebook conducts through Europe must perforce ascend in “lifts,” travel in “tramways,” “book” his “luggage,” “post” his letters, and skirt the “spurs” of a mountain range; but the Baedeker-led traveler has, occasionally at least, the option of taking an “elevator,” “riding” in an “electric car,” or even a “trolley,” “checking” his “baggage,” “mailing” his correspondence, and lifting his eyes to the “foothills.” The American will sometimes find “sidewalks” in Baedeker, and even “furnace-heating.”

The most signal instance, however, of Baedeker’s recognition of the unEnglish English-speaking traveler is the existence of his handbooks to the United States and Canada. Some people seem to imagine that a man hardly requires a guidebook for a country in which his own language is spoken. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I question whether Baedeker’s United States is not fully as useful to the British traveler as Baedeker’s Palestine or Egypt is. The European tourist in the East is prepared for the strangest, and most upside-down conditions, and realizes at once that his own knowledge is not enough for his guidance. The caution thus inspired prevents him in most cases from doing anything very far wrong. When, however, the essential differences lie hidden under superficial similarity, instead of being proclaimed aloud by turban and burnous, he is much more likely to go wrong and get into trouble. The German tourist, who expects a self-important railway official to put him into his proper railway carriage, has very soon to find out that in America he is not regarded merely as a piece of animated baggage, but as a being able to fend for himself, and intelligent enough to read signs and name-boards. The Briton has to learn that when he is one of fifty passengers in the same car he cannot consult his individual caprice so freely as when snugly ensconced in the “corner facing the engine.” He has also to appreciate that what he at first sight may take for culpable eccentricity or negligence in dress is merely due to extremes of climate, — a motive at least as powerful in smothering the æsthetic sense as riding in an automobile. The Frenchman has to be informed that there are no cafés in the United States, in spite of the free, and characteristically loose, use of the word; and that though he may obtain such unexpected articles as paper waistcoats at a drug store, he need not try to buy stamps from a tobacconist. Baedeker has to be ready to explain these and a thousand similar minutiæ. He has to teach the German to be independent, the Briton to avoid “side,” the Frenchman not to doff his hat too exuberantly, and all three that in America temper never is, and never should be, lost.

Some may think it odd to say anything about the great American language in a book intended for people who speak English; but there is good reason to believe that the much-roasted glossary in Baedeker’s United States has been of real service to many a benighted Briton. It counts for something not to mistake the police station for the depot; to repress the natural inclination to shudder at the word bug; to realize that there is no danger of contagion when a fellow-traveler brings his “grip ” along with him, and that he is not a candidate for a lunatic asylum every time he gets “mad.” It is desirable to know that, whereas in England one man requires two spats, it proverbially takes two persons to make one “spat” in the United States. It is well to be warned that a considerable “check” in the course of one’s business is as much to be desired in America as it is to be avoided in the Old Country. It is an etymological revelation to a Briton that he can obtain a “lunch ” in America at any hour of the day or night, and that he can get something to drink in an “exchange.” With Baedeker’s help, the Englishman will be able so to frame his request as not to get something to chew when he wants mucilage; and will find that sophomorical eloquence, despite its awesome name, is not unfamiliar to him, even on his native shores.

The guidebook is sometimes classed, like time-tables and directories, among what Charles Lamb called the βιβλία άβίβλια, or books which are no books. The sacred name of author is but grudgingly allowed to its writer, who is looked upon as naught but the compiler of dry facts. Many would deny that there is anything even approaching scholarship in his multifarious information, and sciolism is the kindest term they have for his science. Personally I am ready to own that I find myself in a perennial condition of knowing a good deal about one country, — the last for which I have edited a guidebook, — and very little about anything else. No enlightened monarch or university has ever honored the editor of a guidebook with a title or a degree, though possibly Baedeker has deserved better of the republic than many a one who can write himself down Sir John or Wirklicher Geheimrath. And yet, pariahs of literature as we are, — mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, — we sometimes gild our task for ourselves by trying to dwell on its ideal side. We try to believe that we are not mere signposts pointing to good beer and comfortable beds, but that we also bear a banner marked “excelsior,” and are really inviting men to turn to better things. By tempting to the visitation of foreign lands, we trust we are ministering to liberality and expansion of view; and that by helping to make the different nations of the earth know each other, we are contributing, not (it is to be hoped) to the familiarity that breeds contempt, but to that fuller knowledge that brings fuller sympathy. The “ blasted foreigner ” is apt to become less “blasted” when we have partaken of his bread and salt, and seen him at play with his children. “Things that from a distance seem preposterous or even revolting will often assume a very different guise when seen in their native environment and judged by their inevitable conditions.”

We all of us need to idealize our lifework, if we are to do any good at it; and in ending this little paper may I “specially let this be its prayere,” that the cynic will not disturb the fond hope, or illusion, — if illusion it be,— that the epithet of “Star-y-Pointing Baedeker,” once used by a student of Milton, may possibly involve something more than a mere facetious allusion to asterisks.