"Wit, style, a keen and original mind, an eye for the unusual -- these are what delight us in the travelogue writer. The compiler of a guidebook, on the other hand, must be a totally different kind of person. His job is to report the location, dimensions, age, and life-history of the monuments, and only...

"The travel writer does not merely purvey information; that is for the Karl Baedekers, the sober compilers of guidebooks. His role is to be the tourist's perfect companion: to be articulate, well informed, a skilled raconteur; to include in what he tells a fair share of the unusual with a dash of the exotic; to...

The Atlantic had an article titled Welcome to America, Please Be On Time: What Guide Books Tell Foreign Visitors to the U.S. It was a little disorienting to read about your own country from the perspective of a foreigner. When you live in a place where you grow up, it doesn't occur to you to...

Looks like the guidebooks are heading for the really small screen: mobile devices. With the soaring popularity of the iPhone and other smartphones, guidebook publishers are moving to take advantage of new platforms, as this AP article describes: Guidebooks adapt to mobile download era . However, they are running into a common problem in the...

At some point in our travel planning, many of us consult a guidebook. How much we each rely on it differs, of course—from those who give a cursory glance early in the process to those who carry it around like a totem from place to place. And some have thrown over guidebooks nearly entirely for...

Back when I wrote Vagabonding , I designed the end-of-chapter resources so that they could be continually updated online and stay as useful and relevant as possible. Recently, with the editorial help of Justin Glow and input from dozens of readers, I added to (and reorganized) my online resources at Vagabonding.net. I've copied the index...

It's hard to believe the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand is in its 13th edition; having first graced the shelves of alternative bookstores and organic co-ops in 1982, a full month before the guidebook that started it all, Southeast Asia on a Shoestring (or the 'Yellow Bible'), hit the stands. Lonely Planet was a little...

Last summer the Italian newspaper La Repubblica asked me to spell out five travel tips, as well as five travel "don'ts" for the coming year. This is what I told them: Five tips for going on vacation Travel to cheaper parts of the world, like Southeast Asia or the Middle East. Your money will go...

When I was in Morocco several years ago, the familiar blue-with-a-red-star cover of Lonely Planet Morocco's guidebook was everywhere; the herds of people who crowded every hostel all had the same one, and we found ourselves tracing the same roads as lots of other people. The most memorable times from that trip came from following...