The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
HARRY MOUNT INSIDE TRAVEL
First published 100 years ago, the trusty Blue Guide is still the king of the guidebook world. I wouldn’t go anywhere without one...
It’s the first thing I pack – long before my passport and toothpaste. No trip is complete without one of my battered Blue Guides: spines now wrinkled, the pages of Northern Italy and Greece – the Mainland falling out after years of over-use.
Blue Guides were my guide to following Odysseus around the Mediterranean; they are my crib sheets on Greek, Turkish and Italian art history tours I lead. And they were my introduction to Florence as a teenager.
And now the Blue Guide is 100 years old.
I have the first Blue Guide in my collection: London and its Environs, by Findlay Muirhead, published in May 1918. It was so popular, even in the closing days of the First World War, that it went into a second impression two months later.
The irresistible format is there in that first volume: a blue, cloth-bound book, with “The Blue Guides” embossed prominently on the cover.
There are some differences in the original: it’s a little smaller than today’s guides and there are no photos, but there are 30 detailed maps and plans.
London is described “as the centre of an Empire at war” and the visitor is asked “to provide himself with an electric torch” and “obscure the lights in their rooms at the proper hour” to comply with the First World War blackout.
Americans are advised to sail to Britain using the White Star line, despite the sinking of the White Star’s Titanic only six years earlier; the traveller should “interview the bathsteward to fix the hour of his morning bath”. Train travellers should use “hot-water footwarmers” in winter.
But more than anything else, Blue Guides are serious things, and were from the beginning. There are mentions of hotels and restaurants, then and now: the first guide recommends the Connaught Hotel, which had, in 1917, changed its name from the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel for patriotic wartime reasons.
The Blue Guides are really devoted more than anything else to art, architecture and archaeology; to dates, facts and scholarly history – and all in thoroughly readable form.
There are no jokes. (John Betjeman claimed there is one joke in the Pevsner architectural guides: the 1968 Bedfordshire volume is dedicated to “the inventor of the iced lolly”, which had sustained Nikolaus Pevsner, the German architectural historian, on his research trips.)
The Blue Guides were rooted in serious German scholarship. The first publishers were Findlay Muirhead (1860–1935) – also author of that first
London volume – and his brother, James (1853–1934).
The Muirheads had previously been the English-language editors of the German Baedeker series set up by German publisher Karl Baedeker in 1828. Baedekers in English had been so crucial that EM Forster’s
A Room with a View (1908) even has a chapter called “In Santa Croce with No Baedeker” – agony for any self-respecting aesthete visiting Florence.
The Muirheads were an enterprising pair. In 1915 they bought the rights to the John Murray travel “handbooks”, which began in 1836. Murray had collaborated with Baedeker to publish jointly the first Baedeker in English, The Rhine (1861). In the incestuous world of early guidebooks, the Muirheads had learnt their craft working for Baedeker in the late 19th century.
And so, by the time of the first Blue Guide in 1918, the Muirheads were kings of the British guidebook world.
The name had come from the French publisher Hachette who, in 1917, agreed to copublish Blue Guides in Britain and Guides Bleus in France.
Since then, the Blue Guides have been on their own travels around publishers: from Ernest Benn in 1931 to A&C Black in 1984, later bought by Bloomsbury, before ending up
The guide says train travellers should use ‘hot-water footwarmers’ in winter
in 2004 with Somerset Books, which publishes them today.
But always, always, they have retained their quality. In 30 years of using them, I have never spotted a mistake.
Famous fictional fans of the books include Patricia Highsmith’s anti-heroes, Tom Ripley, of Talented Mr Ripley fame, and Chester MacFarland – the alcoholic, con-artist killer in The Two Faces of January.
But what are a few dead bodies between friends if you’ve got the good taste to appreciate the blue riband of guidebooks?
Harry Mount is author of
(Bloomsbury)