August is traditionally a vacation month, and vacation often means travel. To make that experience both more meaningful and more efficient travelers have long turned to published guides for both edification and practical advice. Travel guides have a long pedigree, going back almost two millennia to an account of his own travels in search of Greek antiquities by Pausanias, a Greek of the second century AD. Pilgrimage guides describing the principal churches and other religious destinations were common until about the sixteenth century, particularly for places like Rome or the Holy Land. These were followed in the next couple of centuries by guidebooks intended for the upper class (usually) male traveler, sometimes accompanied by a tutor, embarking on the ‘Grand Tour’ to supplement his formal education. The development of the railway in the nineteenth century and the growth of middle class tourism saw the rise of the publisher’s series, beginning with those of John Murray in England and Karl Baedeker in Germany. The early decades of the twentieth century and the increasing dominance of the automobile expanded the audience for travel guides, and introduced a commercial element which became ever more prevalent. Guidebook series like the Blue Guides and Touring Club or automobile association guides, as well as those produced by oil companies like Shell flooded the marketplace. The 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of youth and budget travel, including such classics as Europe on $5 a Day. Souvenir guides to specific buildings or cities, intended to be purchased onsite, were another important subset of travel guides at this time.

Today most travelers get their information online, using specialty websites and apps such as TripAdvisor, thus the guidebook as a publishing genre has virtually come to an end. Studying guides to a particular locality written over many centuries tells us a great deal about the evolution the place described, but also about the cultural and historical assumptions underlying each generations’ response to those sights.

The historical antecedents of the modern guidebook are displayed in the top level of the exhibit case, and drawers one through four feature guides and postcards to Portugal as a whole (drawer 1), and then to specific areas within Portugal: Madeira (drawer 2), Braga (drawer 3) and Coimbra (drawer 4), drawn from the collections acquired from António Gomes da Rocha Madahil, and José Gavinha.

Exhibit prepared by Anne Dondertman and José Gavinha.

On Display (August): Travel Guides