Of Time and Guidebooks

Several years ago at a book sale in a small and pretty town in Austria, I bought a stack of Baedeker’s red guidebooks. I have four of these fragile, red cloth bound little volumes. I also bought a Flaxman Hand-Book of English and German Conversation. The Flaxman’s is from 1907, the Baedeker’s are also from the early 1900s. I think they all belonged to the same person, a Doktor Ernst Fuschig of Scharding am Inn, a town near the current border between Austria and Germany — the Doktor’s name is rubber stamped in slightly smeared ink inside the cover of each book save the phrase book — that appears to have spent a bit of time at an antique book store in Vienna, Franz Malota on the Wiednerhaupstrasse in the fourth district. A blue stamp across the fly leaf tells me so.

When I got the books home, I spent much too long annoying my German speaking husband by butchering translations of such awkward phrases as, “I hope she will find relief from the change of weather,” and “These beavers are light and yet so strong that they will last a long time,” and “Light a fire in my room and tell the chambermaid I should like to have my bed warmed.” The book is divided in to sections that provide some context — discussing health, buying a hat, dealing with the hotel staff — but the oddity of these weird little sentences delivered out of context sent me into fits of hysteria.

I remembered once paging through my brother’s Chinese language texts and having the same reaction over the example, “The Loess plateau is very windy at this time of year.” My brother insisted that yes, it did get very windy out there, but I still didn’t couldn’t get my head around a scenario in which this particular phrase would prove to be necessary. When, in my travels will I ever need to say, “When my servant comes to pay you, he will bring you this old hat to be dressed” auf Deutsch? I still get great pleasure out of flipping through this battered little book to find exactly the right words for expressing my enthusiasm for the White Cliffs of Dover when arriving by steamer or for describing the horse I have in my stables back home.

The guidebooks are a bit more familiar, packed with tiny text that lists the cafes and restaurants, population numbers and major historical turning points, hours and fares for the sailings of steamboats and railways, the usual array of facts, facts, and more facts. The pages are interspersed with beautifully engraved maps on yellowed paper; the parks are patterned differently than the mountains which are patterned differently than the rivers, the buildings and streets are marked in a fading brick orange. Now and then there is a floor plan for a monumental museum or church so you do not miss that critical painting by a middle ages master in salon three on the second floor. The occasional fold out has the waterways printed in the palest blue. The pages are soft and smell just like old books do, of dust and time.

The guide to Switzerland has several large panoramic fold outs — I suppose you were to have stood at the correct view point, book in your gloved hand, calling each of the peaks by name, perhaps holding up your eyeglasses so you could read the tiny, meticulous script squeezed in over each sharp point. They are so pretty, these pages, and thin as cigarette paper, and I am a little nervous every time I unfold them but they continue to hold up and not crinkle like dried leaves. Here is the Mont Blanc range seen from Flegere, the panorama from the Faulhorn, from Langard, from places I have never been where the glaciers have receded but maybe the guest house still stands, where maybe I can still take an updated tram to see an unobstructed view of the lake and buy a cup of tea, though certainly not for the 1905 equivalent of 2 francs 30.

These little books are packed with such minutia as how many minutes the aforementioned tram takes, whether or not the bakery has coffee, and how many taps are at the spring in the tiny pilgrimage church. They are like hotel room bibles in their economy of space and use of paper, they are so fragile and each page is so packed with six and eight point type that they are nearly unreadable. But they were used, all four of them, the maps retaped with browning cellophane. And inside the Riviera guide, there are a few receipts and stamped tickets — Doktor Ernst Fuschig and perhaps his bride ate a meal at the Hotel Guillaume Boissett, an inn which specializes in seafood and offers hot and cold running water. The Fuschings visited the Roman ruins in Orange and the Palais des Papes in Avignon and the museum at Arles and maybe St. Maximin Cathedral, the name of which is underlined in ink. Sometime in the early 1900s, Doktor and Frau Fuschig visited the French Riviera and I have their guidebook.

I thought, when I was still in Austria, that I should travel to Scharding am Inn to see if I might find any references to Doktor Fusching, to see if he had living relatives, aging Austrians who would remember Herr Doktor Grandfather as a man who loved to travel, who spoke excellent French and liked to drink beer in Riviera hotels, but what would I do then? I would rather imagine this turn of the century man and his imaginary turn of the century wife, the two of them fit and optimistic. I picture them smartly and practically dressed, standing close together at the viewpoint in the slanting late afternoon light. “Look, schatzi, there is Mont Joli in the distance, do you see?” And she holds the map, delicately unfolded, it is blocked from the wind by their bodies. She looks at it, and up at the peaks and back to the map again and back to the peaks. “Yes, there it is!” she says. “Look…” and she names all the mountains, pointing across the valley at the granite and ice while time collapses into a rummage sale in a small and pretty place in Austria, where time is folded into a guidebook that sits on a shelf in my living room, more than 100 years from their now, half a planet away.