Print and Tourism

catherine armstrong and elaine jackson

This volume – part of the ‘Printing History and Culture’ series – emanated from the Print Networks Conference: Printing for Tourists, held in Appleby-in-Westmorland, Cumbria in July 2020. It brings together academic scholars at all career stages and book industry practitioners to explore some key moments in the history of travel writing and publishing through the use of case studies about Britain or British travellers. The chapters are arranged in chronological order, from the sixteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Some of the printed forms discussed, such as Wainwright’s Guides, will be familiar to scholars, whilst others, such as the nineteenth-century paper peepshows or the Edinburgh fringe fliers, are more unusual forms of touristic print. The emphasis is on the production, distribution and consumption of such items and considers the social and cultural impact that printed ephemera had on particular audiences, dependent on time and place. The volume demonstrates that across a long chronological period, travel and tourism and printing and publishing are intimately bound together.

This book speaks to intersecting scholarly communities working on these four themes: travel and tourism and printing and publishing. The sub-discipline of travel studies, especially in its historical context, has long focused on the way that printed artefacts have resulted from and resulted in travel for a variety of purposes, including exploration, commercial exploitation and leisure. While tourism studies scholars tend to explore the contemporary world and its fascination with travel, book historians have acknowledged the ways that publications about travel in the past have driven the financial and cultural success of many authors, booksellers, printers and later publishers. Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (1999) by Jaś Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, looked at fiction and non-fiction works alongside film and other cultural artefacts. Jennifer Laing and Warwick Frost use the metaphor, originating with St Augustine, of reading a book being like going on a journey to frame their work Books and Travel: Inspiration, Quests and Transformation (2012). The relationship between reader and traveller was not always symbiotic, especially in an imperial context, as illustrated by Mary Louise Pratt in her theorization of the ‘travellee’ who consumed artefacts of travel writing but did not respond positively to them.¹ Laura Tarkka and Alison Martin develop this idea and show that the line between traveller and travellee, between local, visitor and those remaining at home, was often blurred.² Other book trade personnel straddling the divide between reader and author often participated in meaning-making in travel literature, for example translators.³ In this volume, authors explore the significance of the use of local dialects as a way of fomenting regional pride.

Other authors have more closely focused on the themes of this volume, the relationship between author-traveller and publisher. We argue that publishers and printers acted across professional boundaries too, as did the readers and authors mentioned above, despite the growth of the power of the celebrity author in the nineteenth century. For example, Charles Withers & Innes Keighren examined John Murray’s links with the travel writers whose work he published in the early nineteenth century.⁴ This volume develops those themes and looks at the networks of British travellers, authors and book trade practitioners across time and place. It examines a range of different print culture artefacts, including ephemera and images, and uses various methodologies, as well as recent digital innovations to access the meaning and significance of those artefacts produced by and for travellers. Through the diversity of its chapters the volume offers a valid contribution to current studies in book, magazine, and print history and gives an insight into social and cultural changes from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. While it concurs with Bill Bell, who argued that the long eighteenth century was a crucial time in the formation of the professional book trades, it traces the evolution of those trades before and since, and the evolution of them in relation to the development of travel, tourism and changing power dynamics across the globe.⁵ That evolution, Bell suggests, has never slowed. Despite the decline of British power overseas in the mid-twentieth century, travel writing continued to flourish, until now in the twenty-first century, travel blogs play a significant part in the genre. In addition, students of photography, design, and art history will see how these fields impacted on the promotion of travel and tourism.

Focusing on the sixteenth century, Alex da Costa examines the production of the earliest practical advice given to pilgrims to the Holy Land, including sea travellers, and how printers anticipated and responded to the demand for such texts. The publications discussed include pilgrimage accounts, itineraries, rutters and currency guides as well as those pertaining to any questions the traveller might have on the conduct of the ship’s master and crew.

T. M Vozar and Elif Vozar continue with the theme of ars apodemica in early modern England taking a digital humanities approach using qualitative data analysis to parse a selection of texts using the software package Nvivo. Their work highlights common themes, formulations of the nature of travel, recommendations, motivations, and contributions to knowledge.

Shijia Yu concentrates on a more visual approach through nineteenth-century English paper peepshows: a paper-based optical toy that was enjoyed by all ages and genders. Yu argues that the paper peepshows depicting landscapes, particularly at the watering resorts of Cheltenham, Brighton and St Leonards-on-Sea can be identified as a ‘fancy article’ and evidence of conspicuous consumption for tourists.

Continuing the visual theme, Anthony Hamber & Steven F. Joseph examine the rising popularity of topographical and landscape photography in the nineteenth century. Their chapter highlights the versatility of photographs that document, reflect and inform tourist destinations at a time of rapid scientific and societal development.

Ian Maxted focuses on two distinct individuals: Harriette Armytage and John Follett and examines their illustrated travel journals in Devon in the early 1860s. The collections show how cheap steel line-engraved vignettes were used in different forms to illustrate their travels and offer a fascinating insight into the range of images available to tourists at the time.