A Collection of over 600 "Stranger's Guides" and early Guidebooks to Cities and Towns throughout the United States, 1796 - 1930

1930. Very Good. A large, fully catalogued collection of over 600 early guidebooks published throughout the continental United States. This remarkable collection of highly detailed and multi-purpose ephemeral guides, many of which contain folded maps, spans the entire 19th Century from 1796 up through the First World War and early 1920s. The collection includes over 145 guidebooks to New York City alone: "the Commercial Metropolis of the United States" of which over 100 were published between 1807 and 1898, the year of consolidation of the city of New York.

The majority of the guidebooks in the collection are bound in the original publisher's bindings and printed wrappers, which are particularly important for the additional bibliographical and historical information they provide about these uncommon guidebooks which were heavily used (both on the road and at the places they describe), and often discarded when no longer needed. Most are well-preserved in good or very good condition: about thirty have been professionally re-backed with matching period style calf or cloth, and about twenty have a folded map neatly backed or mended at the folds with Japanese paper. Among the guidebooks in original wrappers, about fifty show signs of heavy use with chipped or torn covers.

The collection documents the nation's great expansion throughout the 19th Century and reveals how each city or town sought to attract both immigrants and visitors to support and further develop local businesses and industries. Here for example is a headline from Nathan Parker's 1867 *Stranger's Guide to St. Louis*: "To Immigrants & Strangers! Nathan H. Parker ... may be consulted ... Respecting Judicious Investments in Farming, Fruit Growing, Mining, Manufacturing, &c."

Included among the collection's many guides with historically important folded maps are several maps of New York City and Philadelphia dating from the 1820s by Benjamin Tanner and Henry S. Tanner, including John Melish's 1819 map of Philadelphia and William Hooker's 1828 map of the city of New York. Also included is H.W. Faust's 1882 map of San Francisco, and 19 "Travellers Guides" to the United States dating from 1826-58 that contain important maps by Henry S. Tanner and Samuel A. Mitchell.

The guidebooks combine up-to-date information and narrative descriptions of civic and cultural institutions, hotels, clubs, churches, etc., street, water and railway transit systems, together with insider tips and advice relative to the history and spirit of the place. Most include one or more folded maps, plans, directories, etc., along with illustrations and copious advertisements. As noted by one modern scholar: "The roughed conditions of travel insured much destruction of these little documents which were sold at inns and stations and called ‘Traveller's Companion' or ‘Stranger's Guide.' They were often updated, sometimes an undetermined number of times within a single year, because demand for the best information was startlingly real."

The collection also includes several city directories from the early Republic which served as the nation's first guidebooks because of the additional information they contained, such as: *Stephen's Philadelphia Directory for 1796*; John Paxton's *The Stranger's Guide. An Alphabetical List of All the Wards, Streets, Roads, Lanes, Alleys, Avenues, Courts, Wharves, Ship Yards, Public Buildings &c. in the City and Suburbs of Philadelphia* (which includes the important 1819 "Map of Philadelphia County" by John Melish); and Charleston's (South Carolina) first *Directory and Strangers' Guide* from 1831.

An examination of the collection's New York City guides shows how they evolved from civic resources for New York residents in early America to "insider" and promotional guides for both local residents, visitors, and ‘strangers' to the city before and after the Civil War. Other big cities well represented in the collection include Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans. Also included are multiple guides to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City, and to several smaller cities and towns throughout New England, the mid-west and northwestern states, and a few southern states.

An historically important collection featuring many scarce surviving Stranger's and related guidebooks. While all are uncommon, over 130 show fewer than 10 printed copies in *OCLC*, of which 29 record only one copy, and 25 are unrecorded. Each guidebook has been carefully catalogued and described. A detailed catalogue follows with photographs of all 614 titles.

Reference: Andy McCarthy, *Old Time Tours: New York City Guidebooks* (May 7, 2020).