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Historical Travels: Travel Guides

Reconstructing journeys from the past

Guidebooks

The Negro Motorist Green-Book: 1940. NYPL Digital Collections IMAGE ID 5206347First and foremost, look to travel guides to provide guidance on how someone could travel to and from or within a specified geographic region at the time of the travel guide's publication. 

Designed for travelers, these travel guides often contain a multitude of valuable information:

  • maps
  • timetables
  • places to visits
  • restaurants
  • hotel accommodations

In addition, travel guides were sometimes published, with a focus on a particular travel constituency. For instance, the Green Books were published, in order to provide a list of hotels, restaurants, bars, gas stations, etc. where black travelers would be welcome. 

To find travel guides, we recommend searching either NYPL's Online Research Catalog and in digital archives like HathiTrust. When searching through these online catalogs, the basic keywords and subject terms to use are:  [place name] guidebooks.

 

See the boxes below for some examples of travel books as they pertain to geographical region and/or specific travel constituency.

The Negro Motorist Green-Book: 1940. NYPL Digital Collections IMAGE ID 5206347

Catalog Tips

To access travel guides, we recommend the following searches in our Online Research Catalog.

As such, type the following into either keyword or subject heading searches:

Guidebooks [Location of Interest]

Guidebooks Travel [Location of Interest]

Description Travel [Location of Interest]

If you are searching for New York City travel guides specifically, we highly recommend reviewing our research guide Old Time Tours-19th Century Guidebooks. This guide contains information on how to search and access these guidebooks in our collection, as well as additional useful resources.

A Selection of Travel Guides

As mentioned above in our "Catalog Tips," we do recommend first reviewing our research guide Old Time Tours-19th Century Guidebooks when researching NYC guidebooks. This guide contains information on how to search and access these guidebooks in our collection, as well as additional useful resources. In the meantime, please see below for a select few recommendations of guidebooks in NYC:

Besides these guidebooks, many maps in our collection showcase information on the subway, elevated rails, and ferry lines for NYC. Please review the Local Transit Maps Tab to see some examples.