Landscape in American Guides and View Books: Visual History of Touring and Travel

In this fascinating and meticulously researched study–a guide to the guidebook–Gottfried shows that tourism in the U.S. matured in a period when an interconnected apparatus of railways, hotels, travel-oriented entrepreneurialism, souvenirs and guidebooks developed to facilitate travel. With books in particular to prepare the travelers prior to departure, the landscape was not seen innocently but through eyes that had already been rhetorically and pictorially influenced. Landscape and the American Guidebook provides insight into the touristic experience, into the guidebooks and viewbooks that actively sought to produce the tourist’s attitudes toward the world encountered, and ultimately into American visual culture. A nuanced and thoughtful study of landscape as form, text, and image.

This well-written narrative examines historical images in tourism, particularly guidebooks, view books, and postcards. Gottfried (emer., landscape architecture, Cornell) describes historical tourism-related visual images and offers a semiotic assessment of their meanings and messages. He covers a wide range of topics of considerable interest to historians, geographers, and other scholars interested in the evolutions and meanings of places, tourism’s role in these changes, and how these transformations play out in photographic or drawn representations. The work is cloaked in a US-centric exploration of the heritage of tourism’s material culture without regard for its larger global context, but this is made clear in the title. With photographic and drawn images as the data source, the author illuminates several very important areas of debate in the current tourism literature, including the evolution of US cultural landscapes, regional identity as portrayed in tourism images, and travelers’ search for authentic places and experiences. Gottfried’s treatment of three elements of tourism material culture that are decreasing in relevance today with advances in technology and virtual communications–view books, postcards, and guidebooks–is needed to help preserve the history of this element of the visual material culture of tourism. Summing Up: Recommended.