The Blue Guides: Great Britain

16mo (15.5 cm), LIV, 684 pp, 90 maps and plans (some folding). Publisher's blue cloth with gilt-lettered spine (binding slightly rubbed at extremities, endpapers and edges somewhat stained). The Blue Guides is a still-in-print series of detailed and authoritative travel guidebooks focused on art, architecture, and archaeology, along with the historical context necessary to understand them. The first Blue Guide (to London and its Environs) was published in 1918 by Macmillan and Co. It was edited by brothers James and Findlay Muirhead, who had long served as the English-language editors of the renowned German Baedeker guides. Two years later, Hachette in Paris published a French edition, but its association with the Blue Guides ended in 1933. Since the 1930s, the series has changed publishers several times; it is now issued by Somerset Books. This is a very good copy of the first edition of the guide to Great Britain.