My New Year started with two events – one reassuring and one depressing.

I’ll start with the depressing one that coincided with my birthday. Which birthday? Let’s not get into details. Oscar Wilde once wrote that, in his opinion, America had never been discovered, but was simply “noticed”. Likewise, in everyone’s life time comes when birthdays are better not celebrated but just marked, or “noticed”, if you wish. Just make a notch in the calendar and move on!

As for the reassuring event, it was an unexpected discovery of an amazing brand of antiquarian guidebooks that I, a devoted guide-book collector, to my profound shame, had never heard of before.

Yes, a proud owner of a reasonably good collection of history’s most iconic guidebooks – Baedekers, Murrays, Warlocks and the superb American 1930s WPA Guides by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration – I had never come across any of the multiple volumes of the UK-produced ‘Admiralty Guidebooks’.

I would have probably never learned about their existence had it not been for the feature ‘Changing Fortunes. Guidebook and War’ in the latest issue (winter 2019/2020) of ‘Hidden Europe’ magazine, of which I am a devoted subscriber.

Written by Nicky Gardner, one of the magazine’s editors and a good friend mine, the article contained a box-out: ‘Admiralty Handbooks: Baedekers with a twist’. From it, I grasped that the series of guidebooks – all 58 volumes, commissioned and sponsored by the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty and written exclusively by the academics from The School of Geography of the University of Oxford and some of their Cambridge counterparts – came out between 1941 and 1946. They covered the whole of Europe, parts of Africa and Asia-Pacific, in short, all the areas affected by the Second World War. The last book in the series, published in 1946, was a 659-page volume on Western Arabia.

In her short tribute, Nicky Gardner was full of praise for the guides’ factual precision and “encyclopaedic approach” to be expected from the publication targeting the military. At the same time, she praised the Handbooks’ style and their “Baedeker quality”.

No need to say that my curiosity was sparked. And not just curiosity, but a natural collector’s desire to own if not all 58 volumes, then at least several of them. Yet, the fact that, according to Nicky Gardner, each book carried a cautionary note to the effect that it was for the use of persons in H.M. Service only and therefore must not be made available to the members of the public or the press, left little hope of ever laying my hands on any. All I could do was to try the Library of the Royal Geographical Society (of which I was recently appointed a Fellow) which, reportedly, had all 58 volumes in stock.

Before going to the Library, however, I – following some vague, yet nagging, recollection – decided to conduct a thorough search of the bookshelves in my own garden office (aka ‘Pegasus cottage’). My instincts proved right. There – buried underneath some dusty dictionaries – I found a dog-eared reprint copy of “A Handbook of Siberia and Arctic Russia, compiled by the Geographical Section of the Naval Intelligence Division, Naval Staff, Admiralty”.

So, unbeknown to myself, I already had a copy of an Admiralty Guide in my ever-expanding – like a girdle of a glutton – book collection! Things do happen…

I hurriedly opened the book at a random page – 323 – and greedily devoured the following passage: “Vehicles. – The ordinary conveyance [in Siberia] is a tarantass, a rude, strong carriage of four wheels without springs, suited to its purpose of transit over these rough and jolting roads. The body of the carriage is borne on two long, elastic poles, which rest on the axles of the front and back wheels. In front is a box for the driver. In the carriage is no seat, but passengers, of whom there is room for two, lie on the floor, which is covered with straw, which travellers will supplement with pillows and matresses for night travelling…”

Hm…

And a couple of pages on: “There are telegraph stations along the important roads, the lines of telegraph being usually in broad lanes at the side of the road. It has been recorded by one writer that in some places over the steppes the telegraph wires are laid along the ground for 20 or 30 vertsts in order to avoid the violent storms that sweep over those localities…”

Fascinating stuff, no doubt, and yet – something did not quite add up, or make sense in the above-quoted paragraphs. Initially, I was unable to say what…

After a minute or so, it dawned on me: the technologies described in the Siberian handbook were much too outdated – even for Siberia! – for the period of 1941-1946, when, according to Nicky Gardner, all 58 volumes of the Admiralty Guides were published. By 1940s, the roads of Russia, of rather the Soviet Union, including Siberia, were dotted with buses (where passengers did not always have to lie on the floor) and lorries, among which were the Soviet-built Ford A and Ford AA trucks and the legendary ‘Polutorka’ – 1.5-tonne GAZ AA trucks, still up and running at the time of my 1950s-60s childhood. As for the telegraph, it should have long been replaced by early radios, with their massive fool’s-cap-shaped loudspeakers, as well as some telephones.

Puzzled to the extreme, I tried to find the year of publication in the book, but the reprint publishers, Pranava Books, India, must have removed it – either accidentally or deliberately, so I had to do a number of internet searches to establish that the original edition of my forgotten ‘Handbook of Siberia’ came out in … 1918!        

Could it be that my learned friend Nicky Gardner – herself always meticulous and precise – had made a mistake, and the Admiralty Guides were born not in the 1940s, but much, much earlier?

As a proper bookworm of many years’ standing (or rather crawling, as worms do), I could not rest until I could uncover the truth. So, my next logical port of call was the London Borough of Kensington, where the Royal Geographical Society and its famous Library were located. Because of my Fellowship and my good relationships with Eugene Rae, the principal librarian, I had unlimited access to the stock, and soon I had a small stack of the 1940s Admiralty Guides in front of me – on the desk inside the Library’s Foyle Reading Room.

The mystery of my Siberian guidebook was resolved on the very first pages of the randomly selected ‘Geographical Handbook for Luxembourg’ – a strange coincidence remembering my passion for Europe’s smallest countries (Luxembourg, incidentally, had its own chapter in my book ‘Little is the Light. Nostalgic Travels in the Mini-States of Europe’).

The title page of that remarkable 354-page(!) volume carried the following information: “B.R.528 (Restricted). Geographical Handbook Series. For official use only. Naval Intelligence Division”. It also had the year of publication – 1944! On the back of the page was the warning, mentioned by Nicky Gardner: “This book is for the use of persons in H.M. Service only and must not be shown, or made available, to the Press or to any member of the public.”

The answer to the riddle of the 1920s Admiralty Guides was in the very first paragraph of the Preface to the 1944 Handbook, written by J.H Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, 1942:

“In 1915 a Geographical Section was formed in the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty to write Geographical Handbooks on various parts of the world… Many distinguished collaborators assisted in their production, and by the end of 1918 upwards of fifty volumes had been produced in Handbook and Manual Form…”

So far, so good. But how about the 1940s Handbooks? Let’s read on:

“The present series of Handbooks, while owing its inspiration largely to the former series [sic – VV], is in no sense an attempt to revise or re-edit that series. It is an entirely new set of books, produced in the Naval Intelligence Division by trained geographers… The purpose of the books is primarily naval.”

I couldn’t help noticing the irony of the last sentence when applied to Luxembourg, a thoroughly landlocked country that has neither navy nor air force! Notwithstanding that, the compilers of the Handbooks had dedicated the whole thick volume to the mini-state – the fact that speaks volumes (forgive the pun) about their punctiliousness and attention to detail.

How about larger countries, like Germany or France?

They had several Handbooks each. France, for example, had four separate volumes: on physical geography, on history and administration, on economic geography, and on ports and communications!

No need to say that handling the Library copies of the Handbooks without a chance of owning them and taking them home was a torture for an old book collector, like myself. Returning them to Eugene with sigh, I made a solemn promise to myself that I was going to get at least some of them for my collection, no matter what it takes.

Well, it took a lot of searching (and some money too) – for obvious reasons, I won’t go into details here, but now I am proud to report that I own four, including the one on Luxembourg (no, I haven’t nicked it from the Library, though I was very tempted to).

Let’s take a quick peek into the part of it which deals with technology, or railways, to be more exact.

Yes, the tiny principality of just over 600,000 people (now) and an area of under 1000 square miles, with neither navy nor air force, in 1944 had a population of 300,000 and 400km of railways (now 617km).

“The railways of Luxembourg are considerably more important than might be expected in the case of such a small country. This is largely because the railway system forms a link in each of several important routes between Belgium, France, Germany and Holland, and therefore carries a considerable amount of international transit traffic. While, however, the geographical situation has given exceptional importance to railways, the construction and operation of the routes have been considerably handicapped by the hilly nature of the country. The main lines follow as far as possible the river valleys, frequently tunnelling to avoid acute bends, while curves are numerous. There is in addition a considerable number of viaducts and long bridges.” 

I never stop being amazed at how many useful facts about a country one can grasp from just one paragraph of a really good guidebook. Just look at the extract above. From it, we learn that Luxembourg’s situation is of a huge strategic importance for the whole of Europe, that the principality’s railways carry lots of international freight, that its landscape is hilly – with green valleys, criss-crossed by bridged rivers and lined with mountains, through which tunnels are being built to avoid acute bends.  A snapshot worthy of an experienced photographer, and yet achieved exclusively with words! That is what distinguishes a great guidebook from an ordinary one, and this country can feel proud of its contribution to the genre – from Murrays and Warlocks to Bradts and Rough Guides, to which we can now add The Admiralty Handbooks.

I hope an entrepreneurial publisher will come forward and reprint them all soon, for good guidebooks never grow out of date: whatever they lose on the factual side, the gain on history and perspective.

I personally never travel with a guidebook that is less than 50 years old!

Try it yourself – you won’t regret it.

My New Year started with two events – one reassuring and one depressing.

I’ll start with the depressing one that coincided with my birthday. Which birthday? Let’s not get into details. Oscar Wilde once wrote that, in his opinion, America had never been discovered, but was simply “noticed”. Likewise, in everyone’s life time comes when birthdays are better not celebrated but just marked, or “noticed”, if you wish. Just make a notch in the calendar and move on!

As for the reassuring event, it was an unexpected discovery of an amazing brand of antiquarian guidebooks that I, a devoted guide-book collector, to my profound shame, had never heard of before.

Yes, a proud owner of a reasonably good collection of history’s most iconic guidebooks – Baedekers, Murrays, Warlocks and the superb American 1930s WPA Guides by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration – I had never come across any of the multiple volumes of the UK-produced ‘Admiralty Guidebooks’.

I would have probably never learned about their existence had it not been for the feature ‘Changing Fortunes. Guidebook and War’ in the latest issue (winter 2019/2020) of ‘Hidden Europe’ magazine, of which I am a devoted subscriber.

Written by Nicky Gardner, one of the magazine’s editors and a good friend mine, the article contained a box-out: ‘Admiralty Handbooks: Baedekers with a twist’. From it, I grasped that the series of guidebooks – all 58 volumes, commissioned and sponsored by the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty and written exclusively by the academics from The School of Geography of the University of Oxford and some of their Cambridge counterparts – came out between 1941 and 1946. They covered the whole of Europe, parts of Africa and Asia-Pacific, in short, all the areas affected by the Second World War. The last book in the series, published in 1946, was a 659-page volume on Western Arabia.

In her short tribute, Nicky Gardner was full of praise for the guides’ factual precision and “encyclopaedic approach” to be expected from the publication targeting the military. At the same time, she praised the Handbooks’ style and their “Baedeker quality”.

No need to say that my curiosity was sparked. And not just curiosity, but a natural collector’s desire to own if not all 58 volumes, then at least several of them. Yet, the fact that, according to Nicky Gardner, each book carried a cautionary note to the effect that it was for the use of persons in H.M. Service only and therefore must not be made available to the members of the public or the press, left little hope of ever laying my hands on any. All I could do was to try the Library of the Royal Geographical Society (of which I was recently appointed a Fellow) which, reportedly, had all 58 volumes in stock.

Before going to the Library, however, I – following some vague, yet nagging, recollection – decided to conduct a thorough search of the bookshelves in my own garden office (aka ‘Pegasus cottage’). My instincts proved right. There – buried underneath some dusty dictionaries – I found a dog-eared reprint copy of “A Handbook of Siberia and Arctic Russia, compiled by the Geographical Section of the Naval Intelligence Division, Naval Staff, Admiralty”.

So, unbeknown to myself, I already had a copy of an Admiralty Guide in my ever-expanding – like a girdle of a glutton – book collection! Things do happen…

I hurriedly opened the book at a random page – 323 – and greedily devoured the following passage: “Vehicles. – The ordinary conveyance [in Siberia] is a tarantass, a rude, strong carriage of four wheels without springs, suited to its purpose of transit over these rough and jolting roads. The body of the carriage is borne on two long, elastic poles, which rest on the axles of the front and back wheels. In front is a box for the driver. In the carriage is no seat, but passengers, of whom there is room for two, lie on the floor, which is covered with straw, which travellers will supplement with pillows and matresses for night travelling…”

Hm…

And a couple of pages on: “There are telegraph stations along the important roads, the lines of telegraph being usually in broad lanes at the side of the road. It has been recorded by one writer that in some places over the steppes the telegraph wires are laid along the ground for 20 or 30 vertsts in order to avoid the violent storms that sweep over those localities…”

Fascinating stuff, no doubt, and yet – something did not quite add up, or make sense in the above-quoted paragraphs. Initially, I was unable to say what…

After a minute or so, it dawned on me: the technologies described in the Siberian handbook were much too outdated – even for Siberia! – for the period of 1941-1946, when, according to Nicky Gardner, all 58 volumes of the Admiralty Guides were published. By 1940s, the roads of Russia, of rather the Soviet Union, including Siberia, were dotted with buses (where passengers did not always have to lie on the floor) and lorries, among which were the Soviet-built Ford A and Ford AA trucks and the legendary ‘Polutorka’ – 1.5-tonne GAZ AA trucks, still up and running at the time of my 1950s-60s childhood. As for the telegraph, it should have long been replaced by early radios, with their massive fool’s-cap-shaped loudspeakers, as well as some telephones.

Puzzled to the extreme, I tried to find the year of publication in the book, but the reprint publishers, Pranava Books, India, must have removed it – either accidentally or deliberately, so I had to do a number of internet searches to establish that the original edition of my forgotten ‘Handbook of Siberia’ came out in … 1918!        

Could it be that my learned friend Nicky Gardner – herself always meticulous and precise – had made a mistake, and the Admiralty Guides were born not in the 1940s, but much, much earlier?

As a proper bookworm of many years’ standing (or rather crawling, as worms do), I could not rest until I could uncover the truth. So, my next logical port of call was the London Borough of Kensington, where the Royal Geographical Society and its famous Library were located. Because of my Fellowship and my good relationships with Eugene Rae, the principal librarian, I had unlimited access to the stock, and soon I had a small stack of the 1940s Admiralty Guides in front of me – on the desk inside the Library’s Foyle Reading Room.

The mystery of my Siberian guidebook was resolved on the very first pages of the randomly selected ‘Geographical Handbook for Luxembourg’ – a strange coincidence remembering my passion for Europe’s smallest countries (Luxembourg, incidentally, had its own chapter in my book ‘Little is the Light. Nostalgic Travels in the Mini-States of Europe’).

The title page of that remarkable 354-page(!) volume carried the following information: “B.R.528 (Restricted). Geographical Handbook Series. For official use only. Naval Intelligence Division”. It also had the year of publication – 1944! On the back of the page was the warning, mentioned by Nicky Gardner: “This book is for the use of persons in H.M. Service only and must not be shown, or made available, to the Press or to any member of the public.”

The answer to the riddle of the 1920s Admiralty Guides was in the very first paragraph of the Preface to the 1944 Handbook, written by J.H Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, 1942:

“In 1915 a Geographical Section was formed in the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty to write Geographical Handbooks on various parts of the world… Many distinguished collaborators assisted in their production, and by the end of 1918 upwards of fifty volumes had been produced in Handbook and Manual Form…”

So far, so good. But how about the 1940s Handbooks? Let’s read on:

“The present series of Handbooks, while owing its inspiration largely to the former series [sic – VV], is in no sense an attempt to revise or re-edit that series. It is an entirely new set of books, produced in the Naval Intelligence Division by trained geographers… The purpose of the books is primarily naval.”

I couldn’t help noticing the irony of the last sentence when applied to Luxembourg, a thoroughly landlocked country that has neither navy nor air force! Notwithstanding that, the compilers of the Handbooks had dedicated the whole thick volume to the mini-state – the fact that speaks volumes (forgive the pun) about their punctiliousness and attention to detail.

How about larger countries, like Germany or France?

They had several Handbooks each. France, for example, had four separate volumes: on physical geography, on history and administration, on economic geography, and on ports and communications!

No need to say that handling the Library copies of the Handbooks without a chance of owning them and taking them home was a torture for an old book collector, like myself. Returning them to Eugene with sigh, I made a solemn promise to myself that I was going to get at least some of them for my collection, no matter what it takes.

Well, it took a lot of searching (and some money too) – for obvious reasons, I won’t go into details here, but now I am proud to report that I own four, including the one on Luxembourg (no, I haven’t nicked it from the Library, though I was very tempted to).

Let’s take a quick peek into the part of it which deals with technology, or railways, to be more exact.

Yes, the tiny principality of just over 600,000 people (now) and an area of under 1000 square miles, with neither navy nor air force, in 1944 had a population of 300,000 and 400km of railways (now 617km).

“The railways of Luxembourg are considerably more important than might be expected in the case of such a small country. This is largely because the railway system forms a link in each of several important routes between Belgium, France, Germany and Holland, and therefore carries a considerable amount of international transit traffic. While, however, the geographical situation has given exceptional importance to railways, the construction and operation of the routes have been considerably handicapped by the hilly nature of the country. The main lines follow as far as possible the river valleys, frequently tunnelling to avoid acute bends, while curves are numerous. There is in addition a considerable number of viaducts and long bridges.” 

I never stop being amazed at how many useful facts about a country one can grasp from just one paragraph of a really good guidebook. Just look at the extract above. From it, we learn that Luxembourg’s situation is of a huge strategic importance for the whole of Europe, that the principality’s railways carry lots of international freight, that its landscape is hilly – with green valleys, criss-crossed by bridged rivers and lined with mountains, through which tunnels are being built to avoid acute bends.  A snapshot worthy of an experienced photographer, and yet achieved exclusively with words! That is what distinguishes a great guidebook from an ordinary one, and this country can feel proud of its contribution to the genre – from Murrays and Warlocks to Bradts and Rough Guides, to which we can now add The Admiralty Handbooks.

I hope an entrepreneurial publisher will come forward and reprint them all soon, for good guidebooks never grow out of date: whatever they lose on the factual side, the gain on history and perspective.

I personally never travel with a guidebook that is less than 50 years old!

Try it yourself – you won’t regret it.