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Updated: June 16, 2025
My tobacconist was in his house-boat on the Thames. I met only one or two acquaintances, who seemed so sorry for themselves that their depression was only heightened by recognizing me. The streets were given over to a strangely clad crowd of pilgrims from other lands, American women with short coats, pince nez, and Baedekers, dragging along their mankind in neat suits and outrageous hats.
A few days later Mme. Dawson and her daughters left, and the San Martinos and the Marchesa Sciacca; and an avalanche of English people and Germans, armed with their red Baedekers, took the hotel by storm. Susanna Marchmont had gone to spend some days at Corfu.
A few photographs of foreign scenes tacked on the walls; a Roman blanket hung as a tapestry over the mantel; a portfolio and traveler's writing materials distributed about a table produced for the purpose, and additions to the meager book-shelf a line of Baedekers, a pocket atlas, a comprehensive American railway guide, several volumes of German and French poetry and the place was not so bad.
So many Americans have used their Baedekers in Europe that I found troops of ready-made sympathisers, who, half-interested, half-amused, at the attempt to Baedekerise their own continent, knew pretty well what was wanted, and were able to put me on the right track for procuring information.
In the square before the wonderful cathedral there would be stillness here and there, perhaps, a pigeon would come fluttering down from the ledges and cornices of the Gothic façade; sometimes a nondescript dog would raise a lazy head to snap at the flies; occasionally the streets would send back a nasal echo as a group of American tourists, with their Baedekers and maps, came hurrying along to "do" the town before the next train left for Paris beyond that ... nothing.
The modern tenant may take in all the magazines, but he bends not the bow of Achilles. He occupies the place, but he doesn't fill it, and he has guests from the neighbouring inns with ulsters and Baedekers. We are far at the Pesaro, by the way, from our attaching window, and we take advantage of it to go in rather a melancholy mood to the end.
So on the shelf to which I mostly resort is a book on the Himalayas; a Lloyd's Shipping Register; a little work on seamanship that every would-be second mate knows; Brown's Nautical Almanacs; a Channel Pilot; a Continental Bradshaw; many Baedekers; a Directory to the Indian Ocean and the China Seas; a big folding map of the United States; some books dealing with strategy, and some touching on medical knowledge, but principally pathology, and especially the pathology of the mind.
It was the day when the church is illuminated, and the visitors come with their Baedekers and Hares and Murrays to identify its antiquities of architecture and fresco; it was full of people, and, if I fancied an unusual proportion of English-speaking converts among them, that might well have been, since the adjoining convent belongs to the Irish Dominicans.
The famous series of guides now called Baedekers take their name from Karl Baedeker, a German publisher, who in the first half of the nineteenth century began to publish this famous series. Members of Parliament still speak of the volumes containing the printed record of what goes on in Parliament as Hansard.
So it was that in the house itself, where more of his waiting treasures than ever were provisionally ranged, she sometimes only looked at him from end to end of the great gallery, the pride of the house, for instance as if, in one of the halls of a museum, she had been an earnest young woman with a Baedeker and he a vague gentleman to whom even Baedekers were unknown.
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