Abstract
Guidebooks are a part of a branch that is driven by market decisions as well as more unpredictable mental and cultural constructs. One of them is a geography of tourism, to which the guidebooks contribute by affecting both choices of routes and destinations, but also by mediating many types of spatial configurations with relevance for this imagined geography and the decisions it leads to. To describe and understand better how guidebooks work regarding these processes is, as this article could give the impression of, not solely a historical task, since these kinds of books in rather traditional formats and types still fill up substantial parts of the shelves in the bookstores of today.
Highlights
In mid 19th century the development of guidebooks went through a process of standardisation, led by the large publishers and to a large extent made possible by the technical revolution of the graphic and printing industry
Notified, discovered and invaded by tourists, not the least with the help of guidebooks, some coasts found themselves conceptually transformed to continuous maritime tourist strips crossing national borders even before halfway developed towards such an identity
18 The use and reading of guidebooks developed in parallel with the growing amount of maps in the books. Before commenting on these cartographic representations, we have to consider a special kind of textualization of space for travellers and tourists in route guides from the 17th century, a kind of forerunners to travellers’ handbooks. They consisted of a page-consuming way to illustrate spatial relations, so called route sketches, which for a long time survived in compressed form among the much more voluminous descriptions of later guidebooks
Summary
ISSN: 2294-9135 Publisher: National Committee of Geography of Belgium, Société Royale Belge de Géographie. Electronic reference Bosse Bergman, « Guides to a geography of tourism », Belgeo [Online], 3 | 2012, Online since 18 March 2013, connection on 30 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/7176 ; DOI : 10.4000/ belgeo.7176. This text was automatically generated on 30 April 2019. Belgeo est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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