Guide Is Stylish, Arch and Busy--Like London

THE COMPANION GUIDE TO LONDON by David Piper, seventh edition (HarperCollins , $19 paper) ; and SLOW WALKS IN LONDON: A Visitor’s Companion by Michael Leitch (HarperPerennial , $13).

London is a big old city, at the same time dense and sprawling, rich with history and with things of every sort to see and do. It deserves--demands--thick guidebooks, then, and that is just what it has in the new edition of the late David Piper’s well-known Companion Guide (revised and updated by Malcolm Rogers).

This is not a quick-reference guide, by any means. Though there is an extensive section of nuts-and-bolts information at the end, most of this tome (and it merits that term) is an erudite, well-researched text best read as a book-length essay from start to finish. The writing is stylish, sometimes arch, sometimes rather busy. “Jermyn Street is no pleasure as architectural progress,” begins one entry, “but at ground level its shops--still almost all small (in name at least, though they may be part of some larger commercial conglomerate)--will magisterially enlarge covetousness.” The cumulative effect of such prose is a happy one: It suggests the tone, the genius loci , of London--itself stylish, arch and busy--even as it specifies the facts and legends.

“Slow Walks” is a much more easily usable book. It offers 24 walking tours within the city (including three considered appropriate for rainy days, a nice touch) and eight more out of town--in Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury and other such popular day-trip destinations. There are maps, plainly marked if not excessively detailed, and the accompanying descriptive paragraphs waste few words on flowery asides.

CROSSING & CRUISING by John Maxtone-Graham (Scribners , $30 hardcover).

Maxtone-Graham is a sort of social archaeologist, studying and (insofar as possible) recreating verbally the structural and stylistic wonderments of an earlier civilization--that of the world’s great luxury liners. The titles of two of his numerous earlier books on the subject--”The Only Way to Cross” and “Cunard: 150 Glorious Years”--pretty much sum up his (and apparently almost everybody else’s) feelings about old-style ship travel.

But no one can accuse Maxtone-Graham of being grounded on the sandbar of nostalgia: Though he paints evocative portraits of earlier liners and life aboard them, and obviously pines for vanished ships and their vanished pleasures, he also appreciates the cruise liners of today. “Shipboard, in my experience,” he writes, “is shipboard, whether we endured the Berengaria heaving across an angry North Atlantic or glide peacefully on the Sagafjord over glittering seas of Bangkok.”

This latest book of his, then, though it has its share of history and of evocation--the chapter on the late, great Normandie is particularly nice--also finds kind things to say about the ships of the Carnival, Princess and other cruise lines. Though Maxtone-Graham certainly finds things to criticize about today’s liners, he also considers them to be, in their own way, honorable inheritors of the grand tradition. And the way people behave and the things they enjoy while cruising, he adds, have changed a good deal less than the outward appearances of the ships themselves. That’s somehow reassuring.

GUIDE TO THE AMISH COUNTRY by Bill Simpson (Pelican , $9.95, paper).

The so-called Amish Country, most of it in Lancaster County, Pa. (with a bit spilling over into neighboring counties), is an attractive but, to modern eyes, often curious place. The Amish people, an Anabaptist Christian sect, lead what seem to non-Amish to be colorfully archaic lives: They ride in horse-drawn buggies, refuse to have their pictures taken (lest they become prideful) and do not irrigate their fields (which are nonetheless famously productive). As Simpson says, they also seem to have a unique distinction: “In all the world, they appear to be the only people who are a tourist attraction.” This doesn’t thrill them, he adds, but he notes that the Amish are in general warm and friendly folk, especially if visitors treat them with respect.

As Simpson makes clear in his comprehensive guidebook, though, there is much to see and do in Amish Country beyond gawking at the Amish. The area is full of handsome old covered bridges, historic homes, museums of crafts and folk art (including one devoted to that branch of craft labeled Harley Davidson, these motorcycles being manufactured in the nearby town of York), farmers’ markets (one of the most famous being in the delightfully-named town Bird-in-Hand) and seasonal festivals. There is even an occasional winery here and there. Oh, and the Three Mile Island nuclear power station is in the vicinity, and has a visitors’ center.

AUSTRALIA: A Travel Survival Kit by Hugh Finlay, Jon Murray, et al., sixth edition (Lonely Planet , $21.95 paper).

The famous Lonely Planet travel guides got their start in Australia in 1973 with a hand-collated guide called “Across Asia on the Cheap,” written by Maureen and Tony Wheeler. Today there are over 100 Lonely Planet titles, all of them jam-packed with information, politically correct, and authoritative without sounding authoritarian. Needless to say, this new edition of the company’s Australia guide (Tony Wheeler was one of the seven authors) covers its territory very thoroughly and very well. This probably ought to be the first guidebook anybody going Down Under picks up.