City Reading: The Design and Use of Nineteenth-Century London Guidebooks Paul Dobraszczyk

This article focuses on the design and use of information in London guidebooks in the nineteenth century, a time when the city guidebook developed into what is recognizable as its modern format. Focusing for the first time on the information content of guidebooks in this period, it examines, in turn, the typographic characteristics of guidebooks and their visual counterparts, maps. The article assesses how the producers of guidebooks—publishers, map-makers and printers—addressed the perceived needs and abilities of their intended readers and explores how actual readers responded, whether through textual annotations or accounts of navigation in the city. It is demonstrated that guidebooks were subject to varied acts of reading (browsing, studying, searching) applied to equally varied information carriers (descriptive text, indexes, schedules and maps). If this ‘useful’ reading has received some attention by analysts of human perception and information, that attention has seldom been directed at information or readers of the past.