Our efforts to help our fellow travelers began with a small, 96-page, self-published book on European travel guides, which came out in 1985. Our work was well received, especially by Bruce Shaw at The Harvard Common Press in Boston. A very travel-savvy publisher, Bruce saw an opportunity to take our small kernel of an idea and expand it to cover the world. The result was Going Places: The Guide to Travel Guides, a 772-page book covering almost 3,000 travel-related books.

To learn more about what we accomplished with these books, here are several full reviews.

Traveler’s Guide to Guides by Jack Schnedler, New York Post, March 7, 1989

It’s puzzling that so many Americans who are spending several thousand dollars for a vacation don’t bother to invest another $25 or $30 in a couple of guidebooks that can help them get much more out of the trip.

Travelers who do appreciate the value of doing their homework now have the ultimate weapon: Going Places: The Guide to Travel Guides.

This 772-page tome contains nearly 3,000 capsule reviews or comments on guidebooks, ranging from big-name series to obscure self-published volumes. The information is organized by geographical region, with a helpful cross-index at the end to subjects. Other appendixes list travel bookstores.

“The right travel guide can make or break a vacation,” say the authors. But “few travelers have even a clue as to the existence of the interesting, well-written titles awaiting them. We certainly didn’t. Then, somewhere along the way, a friend introduced something entirely unknown to us, the travel bookstore.”

When the authors visited their first travel bookstore, “We were simply overwhelmed. There were so many books! If only we had known before our trip to Europe. That was our first thought. Our second was that we were not alone. Many fellow travelers were missing the boat, or book, out of ignorance.”

From that revelation stemmed Going Places, which aims “to provide a comprehensive, though certainly not exhaustive, summary of the better travel guides available.”

From a different angle comes a feature article in American Bookseller, the American bookselling industry’s lead magazine:

Scoping the Guidebook Scene, by Elizabeth Szabla, American Bookseller, January 1989

To help customers and staff choose wisely from the massive travel guide market there is now Going Places: The Guide to Travel Guides. Going Places critically reviews and evaluates over 3,000 travel guides and series, with appendixes of nearly 100 travel bookstores and mail-order outlets, 400 travel publishers, and 150 travel magazines and other publications.

Sound like a big project? You bet. According to Greg Hayes, who coauthored the book with his wife, Joan Wright, the six months it took to compile all the information “was an intense half a year—at the peak, we worked more than 40 hours a week after work,” a feat, considering Hayes is a doctor and Wright is a lawyer. But the Carson City, Nevada-based authors are also ardent travelers who believe that the more informed the traveler, the better the trip, a notion that especially hit home after a 1985 vacation to Europe. “We discovered a lot of neat books after the fact,” Hayes explains. “We also discovered that the average bookstore can’t afford to have a huge, comprehensive travel section. If people don’t know what their options are, a lot of good books are lost.”

So in 1986, Hayes and Wright self-published The Guide to the Guides and Travel Books of Europe. Harvard Common Press publisher Bruce Shaw, himself a travel guide collector, saw an ad for the book in one of the 150 travel publications he receives. “I was impressed by their work,” Shaw recalls. “I’d wanted to do such a book for a long, long time, and I asked them if they’d ever thought about expanding.” Hayes and Wright took the project on and began, in late 1987, by perusing about 6,500 pages of the Books in Print subject index. From there, they sent letters to 700 publishers, outlining the project. To compile the travel bookstore appendix, Hayes examined volumes of the Yellow Pages from all 50 states.

It was the travel bookstores that proved to be Hayes and Wright’s “main tool.” As much as their schedule allowed, they visited stores across the country…and “rummaged through the shelves and asked a lot of questions.” Publisher Shaw adds, “I told [the authors] they really needed to go to the experts—travel bookstores are so supportive and wonderful to work with.”

Besides getting “a lot of feedback” from travel specialists about specific titles, the authors soon found that fact-checking bibliographic and format information was easier done with booksellers than with publishing. Rochelle Jaffe, owner of Travel Books Unlimited in Bethesda, Maryland, is one of the several booksellers the authors thank in the book’s acknowledgments. “Every time Greg called, I’d stop what I was doing, because from day one I believed in their project,” Jaffe says. “The travel industry, in my opinion, is going to be the number-one industry in the world in a few years, and there are so many people who just don’t know what to buy. I gladly let [the authors] pick my brain.”