boorstin16

From Trcmeler to Tourist:

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tells us that precisely at the stroke of noon, just as the imperial military band would begin its daily concert in front of the Imperial Pałace, Kaiser Wilhelm used to interrupt what-ever he was doing inside the pałace. If he was in a council of State he would say, “With your kind forbearance, gentlc-men, I must excuse myself now to appear in the window. You see, it says in Baedeker that at this hour I always do.”

~ Modern tourist guidebooks have helped raise tourist ex-pectations. And they have provided the natives—from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichecastenango—with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date Scripts fai^acfóriNm the tour-ists’ stage. The pioneer, of course, was Karl Baedeker (1801-1859) of Leipzig, whose name long sińce has entered our language as a synonym for his product. He began offering his packaged tours in print at the same time that Thomas Cook in England was perfecting the personally conducted packaged tour. Baedeker issued a guidebook to Coblenz in 1829, first in German; then in 1846 came his first foreign-language edition (in French); in 1861 appeared his first English-language edition. By the beginning of World War II the Baedeker firm had sold morę than two million copies of about a hundred different guides in Enghsh, French, and German, the languages that reached those nations with rising middle classes who were now strenuously adapting the Grand Tour to their morę meager budgets and morę limited educa-tion. Despite the setback of the war and the destruction of the Baedeker plant in Leipzig by the Royal Air Force, lifty new editions were published in the decade after 1950. In the single year 1958 about 80,000 Baedeker guides were sold at a price of nearly five dollars apiece. At this ratę, within twenty-five years as many Baedekers would be sold as in the whole previous century.

Karl Baedeker himself was a relentless sight-seer. In the beginning he refused to describe anything he had not personally seen. His guidebooks have held a reputation for scrupu-

The Lost Art of Trtwel    jO^

lous accuracy, leading many tourists to share A. P. Herberfs faith:

For kings and govemments may err But never Mr. Baedeker.

A testimony to Baedeker’s incorruptibility was his statement in an early edition that “Hotels which cannot be accurately characterized without exposing the editor to the risk of legał proceedings are left unmentioned.” Baedeker saved his read-ers from unnecessary encounters with the natives, wamed against mosquitoes, bedbugs, and fleas, advised wariness of unwashed fruit and uncooked salads, told the price of a post-age stamp, and indicated how much to tip (overtipping was a Cardinal sin in Baedeker’s book).

Eventually Baedeker actually instructed the tourist how to dress and how to act the role of a decent, respectable, toler-ant member of his own country, so as not to disappoint or shock the native spectators in the country he was visiting. By the early years of the twentieth century Baedeker was prompting the English reader to play this role “by his tact and reserve, and by refraining from noisy behaviour and con-temptuous remarks (in public buildings, hotels, etc.), and es-pecially from airing lus political views.” “The Englishman’s customary holiday attire of rough tweeds, ‘plus fours,’ etc., is unsuitable for town wear in Italy.” “The traveller should refrain from taking photographs of beggars, etc.” ___

Baedeker’s most powerful invention was the “(gfar system^ which soon had as much charm over sight-seers as its name-sake later came to have over movie-goers. His system of rat-ing gave two stars (**) to sights that were extraordinary (the Louvre, Yellowstone Park, Windsor Castle, St. Peter’s, the Uffizi, the Pyramids, the Colosseum), one star (*) to sights of lesser rank (merely noteworthy), and no stars at all to the mine-run tourist attractions. This scheme, later cop-ied or adapted by Baedeker ^s successors {Russell Muirhead of the successful 01 ue Guide/ and Penguin Guicfes, and nu-