Leading the Blind

Guide books were the educated dogs which led the blind traveller, giving the latest information on travelling conditions as well as instructing on the places to visit, and their range, even in the nineteenth century, was extremely wide. Murray and Baedeker guides, as well as covering all parts of Europe, featured Peking, Canada, the United States, Japan and New Zealand.Alan Sillitoe has been collecting these guides for many years and has now culled together some of the most fascinating and unusual information from them. He builds up a provocative and engaging piece of social history and conveys what it was like to travel in the hundred years leading up to the Great War - the pleasures, dangers, traps and rare experiences which the tourist was warned against but still often encountered.Leading the Blind is a unique piece of social history which preserves in travel book aspic a whole world now mostly foreign to us on the surface, but whose customs and cultures have remained largely the same. As such it is as informative and instructional today as the guides it analyses of yesterday.