The 100-year-old travel guidebook that refuses to die

Unlike the death of the novel, the demise of the guidebook has not been totally exaggerated. You hardly see them any more on the backpacker trail. City-breakers now use Instagram influencers to “curate” their bespoke trips through overtourism honeypots.

Nonetheless, next summer will see the release of a new print edition of the South American Handbook (SAH) – which celebrates its centenary this year. One can only assume Bradt Travel Guides, which took over the publication in 2019, wasn’t able to rush out a book for the big birthday. Given that the SAH runs to around 1,800 pages, it’s not surprising.

In 1991 I arrived in Buenos Aires with a small suitcase, a few words of Spanish, a job contract as an EFL teacher and a brick-shaped hardback of the previous year’s SAH. A jaguar, a macaw and bromeliads decorated the cover; the thin, floppy Bible-like pages were packed with history, topography, cheap restaurants and bus services, and lots of suggestions for places to stay, from Paraguayan flea pits to Brazilian beach shacks.

I recall using the book for company as well as information. Travelling alone in the pre-smartphone era, it was something to divert and distract while eating yet another plate of roast chicken and chips in a Bolivian border town or waiting for a train to the Altiplano – which could be a matter of days.

Launched when the Baedeker guidebooks were still hip and shortly after many Latin American countries had celebrated their Independence centenaries, the SAH has evolved over 90-odd editions from a business-oriented gazetteer into a tome for budget-minded travellers with time and curiosity to spare. I have picked up a few vintage editions in bookshops over the years.

In Argentina I found a 1941 edition, stamped by Librería Harrods of Buenos Aires. It has beautiful fold-out maps and statistics on heads of cattle and sheep. At the time, the book was published by the newly established Royal Mail Lines shipping firm, which concentrated its business in South America. But adverts – and there are hundreds of them – indicate airlines are starting to compete with steamers.

The first edition of 1924 gives a fascinating peek into the priorities of a traveller in the inter-war years. The index at the front lists, under each country, exportable raw materials and manufactures: rum, rubber, woods, molybdenum, oil, wheat and maize. Animals are listed as products as much as wildlife. Banks, shipping lines, insurance firms and railways feature prominently.

The dictionary collates essential translations like colorete (rouge), sifon (siphon), vino tinto (claret) and limpiabotas (shoeshine). Liner passengers planning on a round of golf during the layover at Cape Verde are advised that “shoes with heavy nails are prohibited on the links”. There’s a long list of British vice-consuls in remote South American townships; their foreign counterparts have offices in Liverpool, Cardiff and Hull.

Buenos Aires, “distant 6,500 miles from Southampton and 109 from Montevideo”, is “one of the world’s handsomest and wealthiest cities”. Coups, Perón, failing finance ministers and the IMF would soon put paid to that.

The continent has changed and world travel even more, but is there a place in the market for a new edition of this hefty handbook alongside Wikipedia, TripAdvisor and Google Maps?

Adrian Phillips, Bradt’s managing director, says: “People have been predicting the death of the guidebook since the 1990s, but, 30 years on, there’s still a strong appetite among those taking immersive trips for accurate, expertly curated information that doesn’t require countless dives down anonymous internet rabbit holes.”

It’s a fair point. Weren’t CD-ROMs once going to replace printed matter? TripAdvisor is as about as authoritative and trustworthy as a PR press release.

Ben Box, 72, who oversaw 29 editions of the SAH between 1989 and 2017, says the challenges of updating a large, multi-national guide are formidable.

“The main difficulties were keeping the book to the required length – there was always so much information coming in – and getting everything finished by the deadline,” he explains.

“Each edition had a team of correspondents (paid and voluntary), sub-editors and contacts in South America, anything up to two dozen people. Then there were all the travellers who wrote and, latterly, emailed. When I started we used to receive many hundreds of letters a year, but by the 2010s that number had reduced quite considerably.”

For a long time, the SAH was annual. Not every country was fully updated each time; some chapters would get a thorough update one year, others the next. Bradt hopes to return to issuing frequent editions, but print schedules for books can never keep up with real-time information. Some 9,000 hotels, restaurants and other businesses are listed in the SAH database, plus hundreds of museums, churches, national parks and other tourist sights. But one in five of the businesses featured in the last edition have closed down since – many of them casualties of the Covid years.

Box believes that the survival of SAH depends on tourism itself surviving in an era of climate change, plus, of course, the continuation of the type of travelling promoted within the book: independent, exploratory, adventurous.

“Whether it remains solely a physical book depends on the latter. People do still seem to like owning books, like they do vinyl records, and there will always be a need for a repository of all the information in a trusted form,” he adds.

The new editor, Daniel Austin, 44, has worked for Bradt for two decades. “It’s a great honour to carry the mantle,” he says.

“One only has to consider that this legendary guidebook’s first publication predates the era of leisure travel for the masses by a full half-century to realise that it’s a pioneering institution in travel publishing.”

All the information, he adds, will be “cross-checked against online sources to help double-check that it is current”.

Print publishing exploiting online sources to improve its product? Well, it’s only fair. I wonder how much digital “publishers” have plundered the prose and information generated by the many hundreds of past contributors to the SAH (and other guidebooks). Let’s hope the AI gremlins don’t pickpocket all the hard work of 100 years and counting.

If you have a spare kilo in your luggage for your next South American holiday, make space for this brick of a book. You’ll be part of history, you’ll never be bored, and you won’t look anything like as sad as all the screen-swipers and pouting posers.

Read the 1925 edition online. The 1940s and 1950s editions have also been digitised at archive.org.