The First American Tourist Guidebooks: Authorship and the Print Culture of the 1820s

Tourist information channels as consumer choice: the value of tourist guidebooks in the digital age

“…The systematic, detailed information about a place can be found throughout the history of books: from reports on the promised land commissioned by Joshua to the three men from the seven tribes in the Bible, to Homer's Iliad and Odissey, to proper literary genres about travel such as the Greek periegesis, periplo as well as canons (compilations of wonders or sights considered magnificent), and later commentarii in ancient Rome (Parsons, 2008). Travel guidebooks as a literary genre emerged in modern Europe with pilgrims' guides for religious and spiritual trips; they developed in the 1600s and 1700s as a consequence of the rise in popularity of leisure travel, which created a new type of consumer demand, and blossomed in the mid-1800s in the context of a larger tourism industry (Gassan, 2005;Parsons, 2008;Peel & Sørensen, 2016b). This was enforced by the 1800s entrepreneur Thomas Cook, who popularised the practice of organised tourism.…”

“…This was enforced by the 1800s entrepreneur Thomas Cook, who popularised the practice of organised tourism. Two of the most important publishers in the history of modern guidebooks are John Murray and Karl Baedeker, whose publishing houses became famous in the 1800s for their supposedly factfocused and objective books (Gassan, 2005;Parsons, 2008;Peel & Sørensen, 2016b).…”

The history of participatory practices: rethinking media genres in the history of user-generated content in 19th-century travel guidebooks

“…In this article, I hazard an explanation of the accidentally observed longue durée of these practices by focusing on what has ostensibly remained immutable amid palpable technological, industrial and socio-cultural changes, namely the genre of the travel guidebook. According to genre scholars, the 'deep' structure and function of the travel guidebook genre remains diachronically invariable, even though its synchronic semantic 'surface' manifestations have altered as the guidebook audience has widened from male and affluent to mass and middle-class, and as travelling habits have evolved (Gassan, 2005). Guidebooks are characterized by genre stasis in respect to two dominant formal and functional characteristics (Jakobson, 1960): referentiality (objectivity, accuracy, facticity) and performativity (performing a didactic, guiding function) (Alacovska, 2013;Jack and Phipps, 2005).…”