Image by Kit.

This essay is for Mohara Gill, because she gave me the idea.

Some years ago, critics worried that the novel was dying. The first novel, Tale of the Genji, was written by a Japanese woman Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century. And so it would be surprising to discover that such a long-lived literary form, which had survived so many drastic cultural changes, had outlived its welcome. Now of course that worry is long past. But there is one literary form that has recently died. When I was young, I organized my trips to Europe using tourist guidebooks. Now, however, these tourist guidebooks have almost disappeared. You can buy old ones on-line, but new ones are not being written. Like the tourist postcard, the travel guidebook is very nearly dead.

When young English gentlemen went on the Grand Tour, they hired what was called a bear leader, an older experienced cicerone. Then in the mid-nineteenth century, when many less accomplished travelers — tourists — went abroad they used guidebooks. The secular travel guide was a product of modern mass culture, which may be dated to the mid nineteenth-century after the demise of the Grand Tour. One could, I grant, find in medieval European pilgrimages an anticipation of these secular travels. When pilgrims came to Venice, for example, they had to wait for the boats to take them to the holy land. And so they used guide books to visit the numerous relics in the churches of that city. And in the middle ages, pilgrims coming to Rome and other holy cities used guidebooks. But what........

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