This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of travel guidebooks and their conceptualisation, use and impact. Guidebooks have been key tourism paraphernalia for almost two centuries and although researched in some areas, academic knowledge on guidebooks in tourism has not been expansively communicated. The uncritical, unreflective and largely pejorative approach to guidebooks in the public sphere, and to some degree also present in academia, is reassessed in this book. This challenges the current limited tourism research approaches to the topic, including the routinely held assumption that the internet has all but destroyed the printed guidebook. This book will be a useful resource for postgraduate students and researchers in tourism and tourism communications and consumption.