Word: guidebook
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...word primer for peripatetics that weighs 2 lbs. 3½oz. Another 100,000 budget-minded tourists will spend $2.25 for Fielding's Super-Economy Europe; the rest of the Fielding five-foot shelf (he is his own publisher) includes a European shopping guide, time and currency converters and a guidebook to the Caribbean. Temp operates Temple Fielding's Epicure Club ?which, for $15.50 a year, guarantees the insecure traveler a somewhat phony VIP welcome at any of 29 top European restaurants, plus free cocktails for two. Other business deals are in the offing, including a possible U.S. television series...
Temple Fielding has been called "a modern Baedeker." The description fits only in the sense that Karl Baedeker dominated the guidebook field during the mid-1800s, just as Fielding does today. For kings and governments may err,/ But never Mr. Baedeker, wrote Poet A. P. Herbert. Stolid and scholarly, an indefatigable wanderer and meticulous researcher, Baedeker was the first guidebook writer to rate hotels and restaurants with a star system (similar to that employed by France's Michelin guides today); he was also a culture demon who directed his readers to every landmark and royal pigeon roost...
Fielding's toughest competitor?and critic?is probably Arthur Frommer, a former Manhattan attorney who writes the budget guidebook, Europe on $5 a Day. According to Frommer, Fielding writes "as though the only reason for going to Europe is to eat one grand meal after another. My people don't want to stay in hotels that have stock market tickers in the lobbies. They're people who want to test Europe?live on the Left Bank of Paris instead of the Right, eat in the same restaurants the local people eat in." Frommer's "people" are mainly travelers...
...travel business has more than its share of venality, but during his 22 years as a guidebook writer, Fielding seems to have kept his integrity. He spends $60,000 a year of his own money on traveling, insists that he has never accepted a free plane ticket. There are seven European hotels in which Fielding allows himself to stay without paying because the operator is a close friend and would otherwise be offended. He makes up for that by overtipping: during a two-day sojourn at Madrid's Palace Hotel, managed by Alfonso Font, he gave away $130 in gratuities...
...After a brief postgraduate career as a mutual funds salesman, Temp turned to the typewriter and sold his first article to the Reader's Digest in 1940. He was then called into the Army and sent to Fort Bragg, N.C., where his commanding officer assigned him to write a guidebook to the base. That book was the prototype of Fielding's Guide to Europe?chatty, chuckly, problem-solving, a little patronizing: ("Each regiment has its own barbershop, staffed by civilians. It's good and it's cheap. Don't think that you look like a monkey after your first...