| Summary: | Academia has long taken an ambiguous stance on travel guidebooks. Indeed, It simply ignored them for the better part of their existence. Only recently have historians, geographers, sociologists or ethnologists, come to realize that travel guidebooks actually are mother lodes of historical, geographical, or social data, allowing to analyze from unexplored perspectives the history and spatial transformations of certain regions, as well as diverse tourist practices. Some level of incipient interest in those sources has therefore begun to emerge. However, most literary specialists still find it difficult to see in such documents anything more than information and prescriptions. A functional, formal, and historical reading of travel guidebooks, as well as of the practices of readers and travellers, can nonetheless reveal their long-overlooked richness. This contribution is an attempt at renewing our perspective on those documents.
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