Useful Sources

These are books that I have found useful in studying tourism. They might be found through good bookshops or on Amazon, Al Libris or ABE Books web sites. Al Libris and ABE Books consolidate offers from second-hand and antiquarian dealers.

A longer bibliography appears on another page on this web site under that title.

Notes of page numbers exclude bibliographies and indexes.

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British Built Aircraft (Series)

Dr Ron Smith

An invitation to review on this web site a series of books about British aircraft and the people who built them did leave me unsure. These pages are about tourism as education – how would these books fit in?

The series is five-strong, with paperback volumes on Greater London, South West and Central Southern England, South East England, Central and Eastern England, Northern England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

They are specialist books. The series is described by the publisher as “the definitive directory of the British aircraft manufacturing industry”. The author, Dr Ron Smith, is Technical Strategy Director with BAE Systems in Farnborough. You would therefore expect highly knowledgeable books which might only appeal to specialists. You would be wrong – as I was. These are attractive, accessible works written, edited and designed to the highest standards – for the general reader as well as the serious researcher.

Yes, they are about a very particular area of industrial history, but there are a number of reasons why people interested in tourism management could find them of use. It might be that the coverage of war planes is not something that relates easily to tourism. On the other hand it was again and again the spur provided by warfare that led to aircraft development. After both World Wars tourism benefitted from the use of bombers converted into passenger carriers. And there are many more ways in which military pressures ultimately led to new better airline services.

Useful illustrations appear in every two-page spread. The text is delightfully laid out and easy to read. I soon got absorbed by all kinds of snippets like the adverts for the Hall Flying School which claimed that Zeppelins dreaded pilots trained by that organisation. I wonder how they knew?

I didn’t know just how many aircraft-related companies there were in my home county of Staffordshire. Looking through the regions shown in these volumes brings home the point. The growth of UK aviation had its roots in hundreds of organisations spread across the whole country. Flying must have caught the imagination as planes large and small, military and civilian, were seen operating from numerous locations. War reporting reinforced the point in Britain that here was a new age in which, when peace returned, exciting adventures would exist crossing continents and exploring exotic places. Biggles might have shown the way, but air charters were not far behind for others to follow. Here are shown the foundations for popular travel.

Having said that, this is a book about the aircraft rather than the operating companies, and it is often about fighters and bombers rather than passenger planes. The regional approach makes it more difficult for someone wanting to trace a UK-wide story. Cross references are limited effectively to within each book, though Volume 5 has a cross-reference table that allows companies to be traceable across all their UK activity locations. Each of them has its general history chapters covering the periods before, during and after the World Wars for each region. Some duplication of broader, synoptic themes therefore occurs. The level of technical detail of aircraft models, engine types and identification labels will overjoy aircraft enthusiasts but might be too much for tourism buffs.

I looked at the Central & Eastern England volume and the Greater London volume (shown above). The London book was the more rewarding from my point of view as it seemed to have much more about passenger aircraft. The reproductions of company advertisements alone was a delight. The photographs revealed fascinating details: Mr and Mrs de Havilland building the first de Havilland machine in Fulham – Mrs de H with her sewing machine stitching together the wing coverings.

There is a lovely advert for the Alliance Aeroplane Company’s Type P1 plane – “the owner-driver’s machine” - and their P4 which took four passengers plus pilot at a fuel cost of 4.75 old pence per mile, equivalent to 44p today. This set me wondering. It quoted a range of 800 miles so for that distance the fuel would have been £15.83 (£352 in modern terms according to the National archives value convertor for 1920). I wonder what the other costs would have been? My wild guess of a flight of that distance being twice the fuel cost (probably more?) would mean each passenger would been paying say £8, or, in today’s terms, about £170 to get to somewhere like Madrid. That city is roughly 800 miles away from London but was not a popular destination then I don’t suppose. Looking at Kenneth Hudson’s “Air Travel: A Social History”, I see that in 1930 Imperial Airways charged £8 15s for a return ticket from London to Paris. Hudson wrote that that was about 50% more than surface transport charges. OK, I’m making a flight of fancy (no pun intended) – but it makes the point that the kind of information contained in books like these by Ron Smith can spark off interesting and useful lines of thought. It will also remind marketers that there are many more factors involved in pricing aircraft services than just the cost of aviation fuel.

Fascinating stuff. You might want to persuade your library to buy copies for you to read rather than purchase your own – unless you want to do more of your own research. It could be well worth it.

British Built Aircraft volumes 1-5
Dr Ron Smith
Tempus Publishing Ltd, Stroud, Gloucs
Pbk 248mm x 171mm
Prices vary: originally £15-£20. Check online prices and further reviews.

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John Vaughan’s book appeared in 1974 and covers just under a century of guide book publishing in England. It is therefore much narrower in scope than Nicholas T Parson’s book. It runs to 138 pages compared with Parson’s 291. Vaughan’s seven chapters run from ‘Travellers and Travelling’ and ‘Abroad’ to ‘The Producers’ and ‘the Authors’. It is well illustrated with black and white reproductions from many of the works that it covers. Being restricted to one country and ninety years’ experience does leave the reader with only a narrow view but one which does relate to the printing and publishing trades well. Readable and useful for cultural studies as well as tourism history it can be found at anywhere between a couple of pounds sterling and thirty pounds – more usually, I’m glad to say, the former.

Nicholas T Parson’s book is more recent. It appeared in 2007 and spans a period from the ancient Greeks to modern examples such as Everyman, Rough guides and the Eyewitness series. It is a much longer book, not only in terms of the number of pages but also the total number of words packed into its eleven chapters. Black and white line illustrations and photographs are used, mainly of older guide books. I would have welcomed more on the current revolution in publishing as on-line guides and print-on-demand publishing begin to bite into the market, but that would require a different scale of study. Parson’s history looks likely to be the standard work on printed guide books for some time to come. At £20.00 (2010 price) it is good value for money.

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Dark Tourism - A Text

28.08.06

Lennon and Foley's book was published in 2000. Reprinted twice, current copies are still in the original edition and therefore do not include anything on the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The book is based around a set of seven case studies, a number of other examples, and opening and closing chapters discussing the topic. War is the overwhelming focus of the studies, with the assassination of President Kennedy and the political division of Cyprus next. The approach is largely based on observation during field visits, with strong use of background material drawing on history and quotations from people involved in the management and development of sites. There are many illustrations using photos largely taken by the authors.

As the first book dedicated to a broad study of 'dark tourism', it is a starting point for much that needs debating around the subject, and follows a number of papers and articles that the authors have written on particular aspects of the subject. Where it is less satisfactory is in the perspectives. A previous posting on this blog about Arlington National Cemetery commented on the narrow judgment that they gave to the JFK grave site. The studies that are included cover a wide field but tend to be briefly descriptive according to a rather narrow viewpoint. Academic studies - they review many - have a tendency to see the places that people visit as the outcome of relatively simple processes. I have a particular dislike of those which sum them up under the label "post-modernism", which seems to me to be an academic cop-out, an attempt to produce a quick explanation which is really too shallow for comfort. They say "Our argument is that 'dark tourism' is an intimation of post-modernity" (p11).

I'm reminded of the ten minute rule exercised by many British primary medical practitioners which inevitably produces only a partial diagnosis, often based on very few, surface, observations. Better is a holistic approach in which more depth and greater breadth would lead to a real understanding of the individual. The places that people visit are formed and operated by a complex history of interacting motives and events. It is misleading to see the resulting outcomes, which appear to share certain characteristics, as automatically stemming from the same motivations. The book uses the term 'tourism products' as if all these sites are merely attempts to make money by western-style businesses, and yet the discussions and examples in the book (a political slogan in Northern Cyprus, the US Holocaust Museum) clearly point elsewhere. Again, similarities between sites of interpretation and income generation are the results of practical requirements, but do not mean that the motivations and the messages are all the same, nor the resulting visitor experience. The visitor leaving the London Dungeon might go out and buy the latest horror movie; the visitor departing the National Underground Railway Center might want to go out and hug the nearest black person.

Lennon, J and Foley, M (2000) Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, London, Thomson Learning
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Naked Airport: A Cultural History Of The World's Most Revolutionary Structure
Alastair Gordon
2004
Metropolitan Books, New York
ISBN 0 8050 6518 0 (hb)
$27.50 (hb)

You might want to quibble with Gordon's referring to the airport as a single structure and the claim that it is the most revolutionary. It demands cries of 'what about railway stations - religious buildings - what about the wheel?'. Leaving that to one side, this is a fascinating and revealing book about the evolution of airports. The examples of very largely American, but it is undeniable how influential those have been. Understanding the lure, acceptance and growth of air travel is made much clearer by following how thinking about airport designs has changed. New York's La Guardia was originally to be a combined flying boat and land aircraft base: there were designs for virtually assembly-line style servicing. If you want to know the future, read about the past, said someone. Then we know where we're going - by plane.
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No Frills: The Truth Behind The Low-Cost Revolution In The Skies
Simon Calder
2002
Virgin Books, London
ISBN 1 85227 932 X (hb)
£16.99 (hb)
Paperbook edition available

Despite the specific title, this is one of the most useful books about air travel over the last few decades. Simon Calder is the Travel Editor of the Independent newspaper in the UK, making a point in his travelling as a journalist never to accept freebies from operators. His style is crisp and readable, though sometimes so concise that it takes a couple of re-readings to get his exact meaning clearly. This is not an academic text book but has solid information built up from years observing the industry, and is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand just what is happening in the industry - and why - and where it is going.
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Global Airlines
Pat Hanlon
Elsevier/Butterworth Heinemann
1999 (2nd edition)
ISBN 0 7506 4350 1
£29.99

Illustrated is the second edition of an excellent book which is packed with useful background, facts and figures and discussions of issues. For all its size and importance, there are not so many text books on passenger services by air (and certainly not many on airports). Plane spotters' books and works on military aircraft are two a penny (well, you know what I mean). This book packs a lot in to a small space. As the second edition it is getting out of date compared with the fast-changing state of the airline industry, but the author's May 2006 book Global Airlines: Competition in a Transnational Industry pushes the story forward.
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Diamonds In The Sky
Kenneth Hudson and Julian Pettifer
Bodley Head/BBC
1979
ISBN 0 370 30162 5
£7.95

Probably out of print and getting on a bit, but still useful if you can find it in a library or second-hand. This book grew out of Hudson's earlier Air Travel: A Social History and was revised to accompany Julian Pettifer's BBC TV series of the same name. Read it first and then move to Simon Calder's No Frills and then Pat Hanlon's Global Airlines for an excellent coverage of the growth and current situation of the world passenger airline industry. The late Kenneth Hudson's work in the field of industrial history gives the book its solid, knowledgeable base, and Pettifer's quality journalistic approach combine to produce an excellent account.
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Burton Holmes - Travelogues: The Greatest Traveller of His Time, 1892-1952
Genoa Caldwell (ed)
Los Angeles, Taschen
ISBN 3-8228-4815-8
£29.00

In 1892 a young American named Burton Holmes borrowed money from his family to make a tour of Japan that would last five months. Holmes took photographs on glass lantern slides. Knowing that on his return to his native Chicago he would want to show off his work to the best advantage he employed artists to hand-colour the slides using extremely fine, detailed work. The following year he gave four public lectures about Japan to paying audiences and was an immediate success. His mother, the wife of a prominent business man, gave him most of over 2,000 addresses for the mailing campaign that drew in his audiences from amongst the wealthy of Chicago. A sixty-year career as a traveller and lecturer had been born.

The story of Burton Holmes is told in this new large-format book from Taschen. It is based on his immaculate photos from around the globe and his extensive writings.

Within four years of that first visit to Asia, Holmes had enlisted the help of one of the main people who had been assisting him, Oscar Bennett Depue, to shoot movie film. The first public exhibitions of films projected onto screens for audiences to view simultaneously had taken place only the previous year in New York and Paris. The Holmes-Depue films, each only 25 seconds long, were therefore amongst the very first cinema productions. Like the work of Lumiere and Acres they showed everyday scenes which were interesting innovations for audiences, but Holmes went further than just round the corner to get many of his sequences. He is thought to have made the first travel picture, purposely shot in one country for an audience in another when he and his camera operator filmed St Peter's in Rome. The book, of course, can only describe the films, but examples are available from specialist sources in some DVD collections - see below.

Burton Holmes was not the first, nor the last, travelogue presenter. His inspiration was a man named John L Stoddard, a famous nineteenth-century lantern-slide lecturer, with whom he began a long acquaintance. In the USA today there are many lecturers in the business of showing travel films to paying audiences. John Holod still makes travel films and presents them to audiences paying to see his shows: his work is the subject of a video produced by Jeffrey Ruoff described in an earlier posting which will shortly be transferred to this web site. This book is a sumptious record of the work of someone who brought the world to the notice of thousands of Americans for many decades, well before the cinema and TV took over from the live presenter.

See the Travel Video Store on
http://www.travelvideostore.com/index.php
This web site gives details of US public travel lecturers working today.
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Books of Concern about Tourism

There has been an explosion of publishing about tourism and tourism management over the last quarter-century. After an early phase of pioneering authors came the second phase as gaps in the market were rapidly plugged - though there are plenty left yet, tourism being such a wide subject. It feels now as though commercial competition is taking over much of the field with not only each publisher, but every university and every travel writer keen to fly their own flag. It's a third phase.

The fourth when it comes will be one dominated by critical books on the one hand and niche-filling works on the other. The latter are likely to be heavily analytical and aiming to examine the hows and whys of tourism at a nuts and bolts level. It will be during that phase that it is realised tourism is not one industry but lots of them, and that travel is really a label applied to human mobility across the face of the planet.

There are plenty of good, solid books around which point out the pitfalls as well as the pleasures of travel and tourism. Most of them are the ones engaging with themes of sustainability, planning, community development and cultural communication. They have come to the fore as tourism management courses move beyond marketing and money-making to lock on to the great global issues which threaten to destroy communities and environments. 21st-century tourism studies will be increasingly dominated by the threat of this modern juggernaut.

The three books illustrated represent some of the earlier attempts to highlight concerns. Sir George Young's paperback for Pelican appeared over thirty years ago in 1973 and is not easy to find today. It came only eleven years after Rachel Carson's famous attack on the use of pesticides, 'Silent Spring', and 24 years after Aldo Leopold's 'A Sand County Almanac' which called attention to the nature of human-natural world interaction. Young's book began the examination of tourism's impact's on the environment. It gives an important snapshot of the early 1970s, so different from today but with clear indicators of where problems were being created.

Louis Turner and John Ash came three years after the George Young book and added both range and depth. The cultural impact of what they termed 'the golden hordes', evoking images of Ghengis Khan's maurauding armies, were described as "the enemy of authenticity and cultural identity, a systematic destroyer of beauty and an arouser of disconent". This kind of polemic fed in to popular and media discussion during the 1970s and 1980s in a dangerously one-sided fashion: and what is fashionable is too often undiscriminating and ill-informed. While raising quite proper and timely fears about tourism, the book was in a way guilty itself of damaging the authentic discussion of the subject and arousing discontent. There is NO substitute for enlightened examination if the truth is to be found.

Some people have found Jonathan Croall's 1995 book too one-sided. Yet in posing the same question that Turner and Ash did, he came up with rather more mixed answers. His book takes a case-study approach - Tarka the Otter country in Devon, Center Parcs in Nottingham, the Isle of Purbeck and the Peak district, plus a number of smaller ones. It is a more balanced discussion, even if it does wave the quotation at the reader: "the spectre of tourism", emblazoned across the back cover.

Young, G (1973) Tourism: Blessing or Blight?, Harlow, Penguin Books
Turner, L & Ash, J (1976) The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery, New York, St Martin's Press
Croall, J (1995) Preserve or Destroy: Tourism and the Environment, London, The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
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