Baedeker

• 1. Introduction

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  Baedeker guides became so thoroughly identified with travel itself that a new English verb eventually emerged from the name. "Baedekering" entered the language as a term for travelling through a country in order to write a travelogue about it. The publishing house behind that word opened on the 1st of July 1827 in Coblence, the Rhineland city now known as Koblenz. Its founder, Karl Baedeker, was the eldest of ten children in a printing and publishing family from Essen, Germany. His family also published the local newspaper, the Essendische Zeitung, and the expectation was that Karl would stay and join the family firm. He had other ideas about what a travel guide could offer its readers. The seed of his approach was planted five years into his new venture. He had come into possession of a travel handbook that another man had written.

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• 2. A New Kind of Guidebook

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  In 1832, Karl Baedeker's firm acquired the publishing house of Franz Friedrich Röhling in Koblenz. Among its assets was a travel handbook by a professor named Oyvind Vorland, published in 1828. Its title was "Rheinreise von Mainz bis Cöln," a phrase translating roughly to a Rhine journey for travellers on the move. The book's previous editor, Johann August Klein, had died in 1831, after which the work went out of print.

  Baedeker saw the handbook as a starting point, not a finished product. He prepared a new edition drawing on Klein's material and adding substantially to it. His guiding aim was precise: to free the traveller entirely from the need to look for information anywhere outside the guide. Routes, transport, accommodation, restaurants, tipping customs, sights, recommended walks, and prices would all be gathered between two covers. John Murray's English guides had given Baedeker a model, but he pushed the format further in its practical reach than Murray had gone.

  Around 1850, Karl changed the family name from the umlaut form Bädeker to the anglicised Baedeker. The adjustment made the name easier to read and print across European languages. Karl left behind three sons: Ernst, Karl and Fritz. He died in 1859. Ernst had been a partner in the firm since New Year's Day of that year, after training in Braunschweig, Leipzig and Stuttgart.

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• 3. Ernst and Karl

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  At the English publishing house Williams & Norgate in London, Ernst Baedeker had gained the international experience his father's guides would need. That perspective showed in 1861, when Ernst oversaw three new Baedeker publications in a single year. The first was the firm's debut in English, a handbook on the Rhine from Switzerland to Holland. He also published a German guide to northern Italy and a French guide covering the same region. Three new titles in a single year was a remarkable pace for a house still adjusting to its new head.

  Ernst died on the 23rd of July 1861 in Egypt, of sunstroke. He was still in his twenties and had been running the firm entirely on his own for less than two years. His younger brother Karl, born in 1837, stepped in immediately. Karl II, as he came to be known in the family record, kept the pace going. Between 1861 and 1877, he added fourteen new guides. Four were in German, seven in English, and three in French. Destinations ranged from London and Paris to Switzerland, southern Germany, and the regions of Italy.

  Fritz, Karl's youngest son, joined the firm in 1869 as a partner and was named general manager. In 1872, Fritz shifted the firm's headquarters from Koblenz to Leipzig. Most of Germany's leading publishers had established themselves there. In 1877, Karl II withdrew from the firm, moving to a sanatorium near Esslingen am Neckar with an incurable mental condition. He remained there for the rest of his life. In Leipzig, Fritz had already identified Eduard Wagner, a cartographer who would become one of his most important collaborators.

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• 4. Maps Without Equal

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  Ernst Debes had built his reputation at Justus Perthes, one of Germany's leading cartography firms, based in Gotha. Fritz brought him to Leipzig to form a new company with Eduard Wagner. Their firm, Wagner and Debes, took offices directly adjacent to the Baedeker headquarters. What it produced would set a standard in travel publishing that competitors would struggle to approach.

  Herbert Warren Wind, the author of The House of Baedeker, documented what Wagner and Debes brought to the partnership. Wind wrote that the firm supplied the guides with "the best maps in the world, many in color." Their output also included detailed ground plans of palaces, churches, gardens, museums and castles. They also produced what Wind called "some extraordinary panoramas of Alpine ranges." It was, Wind concluded, "the sheer technical skill of the staff at Wagner & Debes" that kept the Baedeker guides well ahead of rivals. Michael Wild, the Baedeker chronicler, called the maps simply "a feast for the eye."

  New editions were printed by several Leipzig firms. The pre-1872 guides continued to be produced at the G.D. Baedeker printing works in Essen. Fritz had also sold the firm's bookselling business in 1870, putting all resources behind the guides. In 1909, Leipzig University formally recognised what Fritz had built. The university conferred an honorary doctorate on him at its own five-hundredth anniversary convocation.

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• 5. Fritz's Golden Age

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  Russia, Sweden, Norway, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Greece were among the destinations Fritz Baedeker eventually covered. His guides also reached the United States, Canada, India, and South East Asia. Plans for China and Japan were among his most ambitious, but the outbreak of war in 1914 forced him to abandon both. Across a reign lasting over fifty years, Fritz produced 73 new Baedekers in total. He released 39 in German between 1872 and 1925, and 21 in English between 1872 and 1914. A further 12 French titles appeared between 1882 and 1910.

  Hans, Ernst and Dietrich, three of Fritz's four sons, worked alongside him as editors and writers. His fourth son, Karl Baedeker III, chose academia and became a professor of physics at the University of Jena. Karl III was killed in action at the Battle of Liège in August 1914. His son, Karl Friedrich, would later play a decisive role in the firm's history.

  After 1914, the First World War cut deeply into the firm's markets. In 1920, Fritz broke with tradition, allowing limited advertising into guides on German cities and regions. Fritz's time at the helm had lasted over fifty years. His eldest son Hans was fifty-one years old when he took charge in 1925. He would face a firm still carrying the damage of the post-war years.

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• 6. Catastrophe and Persistence

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  Government bonds had been a disastrous investment during the First World War, and the losses fell squarely on Hans Baedeker's desk. Anti-German sentiment in post-war America and France cut into sales in two of the firm's most important markets. Rising inflation compounded the losses, and then the Great Depression put paid to any hopes of an early recovery.

  Hans was asked by the Nazi regime to produce a guidebook for the German Army of Occupation in Poland. The historical introduction was to be written on the Nazis' own terms. That became the 1943 book Das Generalgouvernement. The Nazis had also been vetting the Baedeker guides for years, proposing changes to the text and limiting who could purchase certain editions. Despite these conditions, Hans produced twelve new titles in German and five in English. He also published the 1928 eighth German edition of Egypt and its 1929 eighth English edition. Many collectors of travel literature consider those two volumes the finest Baedeker guides ever produced.

  On the 1st of July 1927, Hans celebrated the centenary of the firm's founding with a reception at the Leipzig "Harmonie." Allen & Unwin, the London publisher that had represented Baedeker in Britain, provided a loan that kept the firm going. In the early hours of the 4th of December 1943, the Royal Air Force bombed Leipzig. The Baedeker headquarters was destroyed along with the firm's entire archive. The 1948 Leipzig guide was the last Baedeker the firm would publish in the city. Hans had printed 10,000 copies through the Bibliographisches Institut to work around the Russian ban on a Baedeker publishing licence. After roughly 1,000 copies had been sold, the Russians confiscated what remained. They claimed a map showing the site of their Kommandantura constituted a military secret.

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• 7. Rebuilding the Name

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  Karl Friedrich Baedeker, born in 1910, was the son of Karl III and had worked as an editor at the firm before the war. He served in the military, rose to the rank of captain, and near the war's end was taken prisoner in Austria by the Americans. After his release, he settled in Malente-Gremsmühlen in the British zone, where his wife and sister were living. His uncle Hans had chosen to remain in Leipzig, now under Russian jurisdiction. The two were close, and Karl Friedrich could draw on Hans's decades of experience from a distance. Hans had often told him: "You're the oldest Baedeker of the next generation. You will carry on."

  Several American, British and German publishers approached Karl Friedrich with offers to buy the Baedeker name. He declined them all. He explained his reasoning to Herbert Warren Wind: "The war had been almost too much for us. But I never seriously considered any of the offers. I had been brought up to regard Baedeker as a family company. It was as simple as that." Allen & Unwin, the London publisher, extended a second loan to help Karl Friedrich get started. In December 1949, he published his first guide: 10,000 copies of Schleswig-Holstein, printed in Glückstadt, near Hamburg.

  In 1951, Karl Friedrich and Oskar Steinheil, a pre-war Baedeker editor, signed an agreement with Shell AG and with Kurt Mair (1902-1957), a Stuttgart-based printer. Together they produced a series of compact motoring guides called Baedekers Shell-Autoführer. These were slim volumes designed to fit in a jacket pocket or a car's glove compartment and were a significant commercial success. Karl Friedrich's only son Florian joined the business after completing his studies in Munich in 1971. Florian helped prepare the Munich guide released for the 1972 Olympic Games. In 1974, the firm published its first post-war international guide: a 872-page Baedekers USA in German. It was financed largely by Lufthansa, the German airline.

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• 8. The Last Baedekers

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  Karl Friedrich died in 1979, and Florian Baedeker stepped into the role. Florian had already worked on guides to Baden-Baden, Constance, Strasbourg and Wiesbaden, all published in the mid-1970s. His guide to Basel, published in 1978, was considered by many to be among his best work. The city had a particular resonance: Karl Baedeker had first covered Basel in his celebrated Swiss guide, "Schweiz." That guide had first appeared in 1844.

  Florian Baedeker was killed in a parachuting accident on the 26th of October 1980. He was thirty-six. His mother, Eva Baedeker, née Konitz, born in 1913, stepped in to run the firm following his death. Eva was the last member of the Baedeker family to take an active role in managing the publishing house that Karl had founded. Before her own death in 1984, she negotiated the sale of the Freiburg branch to the German publisher Langenscheidt. The Baedeker name was retained under all subsequent ownership arrangements.

  In 1987, both branches of the operation merged in Ostfildern/Kemnat as Karl Baedeker GmbH. Langenscheidt and the Mairs publishing group held the company between them. In 1997, Mairs Geographischer Verlag, now known as MairDumont, became the sole owner of Verlag Karl Baedeker. The new guides were produced under the catchphrase "Wissen öffnet Welten," meaning "Knowledge opens worlds." A fifth section was added to the traditional four-part structure, titled "Erleben und Geniessen," meaning "Experience and Enjoy." These were the first Baedeker publications to incorporate infographics. By then, the Baedeker catalogue covered over 150 destinations around the world.

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