The Pleasure Principle : GRAND TOURS AND COOK TOURS: A HISTORY OF LEISURE TRAVEL; 1750 to 1915.<i> By Lynne Withey</i> . <i> William Morrow: 338 pp., $30</i>

Since the beginning of writing, and without a doubt before that, telling about one’s travels has been a pastime, an attempt to educate or amuse, an ego trip or an occupation. Writing about travel writing has been a scholarly or critical endeavor almost as long. In her new book, Lynne Withey, associate director of the University of California Press and author of successful volumes about Abigail Adams and Captain Cook, gives us such a study.

She concentrates, however, on “journeys of some distance,” and on “people who traveled mainly for the fun of it--thus excluding explorers, pilgrims, traders, emigrants and others who traveled on business or out of necessity.” That is to say, she writes a history of travels done for “pleasure” and limits that history to the period from about 1750 to 1915, between the approximate slowdown of the famous grand tour and the primitive beginnings of air travel. She writes an attractive history well.

Her history is divided into three parts, the first two of which are devoted largely to travel in search of picaresque scenes in the Alps, the Hebrides and the English Lake Country, to the appeal that Italy held for the British and Americans, and to the careers of John Murray, Karl Baedeker, Cesar Ritz and Thomas Cook. The first two made the guidebook into an art form after 1830. Ritz’s name is fixed permanently in the English language for his luxury hotels and restaurants. Cook’s name, in spite of later competition, is still synonymous with arranged tours, first in England and France and then throughout the world.

The story of the guidebook takes us up the Nile, over to the Holy Land and, after 1869 and the transcontinental railroad, across the United States. Withey, like many other scholars, becomes so enthusiastic about the period engaging her that she perhaps does not give enough credit to earlier periods.

For example, the ancients had guides for Ilium as well as the one Pausanias compiled in the 2nd century after traveling the Mediterranean. When Jerusalem was opened to foreigners in 333, not only could pilgrims follow any one of three well-advertised routes to Rome, but they could also choose from a number of guides for the monuments of the Holy Land. Germany led in the production of such books in the 16th century, while the English published beautifully illustrated volumes for travelers in the 17th century as well as the popular “Instructions for Forreine Travell” by James Howell. But of course none of these was so thorough or attractive or exact as those carried by Cook’s tourists.

Withey would probably be quick to admit that because she was concerned most with the business of travel, she was forced to ignore not only the guidebooks of an earlier period but the often fascinating books written with their help. Perhaps one of the most difficult decisions she had to make, however, was the choice of travelers to quote for firsthand observations about a country, a means of travel, a particular scene, the quality of food served or the importance of a particular monument.

She chose well among the famous travelers, such as James Boswell, Goethe, William Wordsworth, Stendhal, Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain. Goethe, the many-faceted genius with one of the great books about Italy (“Italian Journey”), is the non-English-speaking writer perhaps quoted most. And Dickens the inimitable is used for both America and Italy. Missing, however, are a number of favorite writers who traveled as much for pleasure as for occupation or education, among them Ramond de Carbonnieres and George Forster, both near the end of the 18th century.

The first of these knew the Pyrenees as well as anyone ever did and produced a poetic and beautiful book about them that should be important in the picaresque tradition. Young Forster went with his botanist father on Cook’s Resolution to the South Pacific, as Withey knows very well, and then published an account of the voyage that is as attractive and as sensitive as most good travel books.

What is also missing, more than the choice of travelers, are the long quotations that give the flavor and help demonstrate the skill and power of the great travel writers. Almost every quotation in “Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours” is short because it is designed, as it should be, to make a point.

The most artful talent Withey demonstrates is her ability to show why people could be enticed or encouraged to take a long journey or discouraged from taking one. Since Britain and France were constantly at odds from 1689 to the Treaty of Paris in 1763, grand tour-ers sometimes had to avoid France and go through the German states to Italy, just as Americans who might have sailed for Europe were forced to curb their ambitions. The Napoleonic Wars disrupted travel for pleasure in Western Europe. But when the conquering Napoleon built better roads and museums in the reorganized Europe, travelers soon made up for lost time, only to be held at home again for some years while Napoleon, now emperor, was trying to maintain his power.

The Franco-Prussian War had a similar effect on travel for pleasure. And in 1914, when the Panama Canal opened on the same day that Britain declared war on Germany, Americans who might have sailed for Europe joined other Americans in visiting the San Francisco Exposition honoring the canal. Only a few years before, San Francisco had experienced the Great Earthquake, which altered the proposed routes of travelers or brought others to see the wreckage.

On the other hand, routes were arranged, or altered, so a person could visit some natural wonder. One of the best parts of this history of leisure travel tells of the popularity of Niagara Falls, a must for foreign visitors as well as Americans. Or there were the boat trips up the Hudson, also a must, and, later, those up the Nile to Aswan and even beyond, especially after steamboats took over in the 1880s. The Nile section is one of the longest because of the now-unbelievable arrangements travelers had to make, their clannishness, the monuments they stopped to see, the kinds of people they encountered.

As one would guess, many inventions affected travel. When camels or horses and wagons were the chief means of transportation, good roads were not so important. But as carriages and coaches began to be more popular, not only did suspension systems make coaches more comfortable but, early in the 19th century, macadam roads made traveling much quicker. Thus, we learn, a coach that went from London to Edinburgh in 10 to 12 days in the 18th century needed only two days by 1830. By that time, steam was making railroads possible. All these developments, reinforced by a stretch of world peace, brought about a great surge in travel. From 1830 to the use of the automobile before 1910, the story we hear is about organized tours in the Cook fashion and their influence on speed and comfort, all of which were aided by such advances as dynamite, which helped build roads and cut tunnels.

During the period after 1750, paintings and art in general directed the paths of travelers, who arranged to see artists at work or to visit the Louvre after Napoleon remodeled it. Still, of course, a major attraction today, art helped immeasurably to make Italy so admired both by connoisseurs such as Goethe and Stendhal and by the hurried tourist directed by his Baedeker or, later, his Michelin Guide.

Among the best attractions for the traveler were famous people, known writers and even pieces of literature. George Washington saw great numbers of visitors. Lafayette attracted Americans to Paris until he died in 1834. Wordsworth’s book for visitors had 2,500 names written in it, and Kipling was not the only circumnavigator to go out of his way to talk with Twain, another inveterate traveler and travel writer.

One of Withey’s often astounding bits of information explains how, after Byron finished his own grand tour and wrote “Childe Harold,” tourists, carrying a copy of the poem, chose an itinerary to follow Byron’s hero. Even more visited Scott’s country because of his poem “The Lady of the Lake.” Less astounding, no doubt, is the fact that so many people walked in the steps of Johnson and Boswell, as they still do.

One of the other themes of “Grand Tours and Cook Tours” is the competitive nature of human beings. We learn of the first man, then the first woman, to climb a certain Alpine peak, not just Mont Blanc. We learn of the first steamboat to cross the Atlantic regularly and of the race between two ships to see which would sail the distance first--one would hit an iceberg and sink.

We read of the first trains in France and England, of the first railroad tracks in many parts of the world, especially the United States. We are informed about the first use of the star system to rate hotels and restaurants. And we are entertained by stories of the first automobile to cross North America and the first circumnavigation of the globe in less than 80 days, inspired, of course, by Jules Verne’s novel.

But the “firstness” theme may have backfired. When we read that one of Napoleon’s officers who led a small army to the Holy Land was the first European to see Jerusalem since the Crusades, we can discover elsewhere that others did indeed precede him. One of these was Ludovico di Varthema, an Italian whose account of his travels (1510) was famous in single editions and then in big collections. And there were three Englishmen who managed to reach Jerusalem between 1603 and 1613, one being the well-known writer George Sandys.

But such quibbles do not alter the fact that Withey’s new book is a treasure trove of information and very often entertaining, a history to help fill the leisure hours of any fireside traveler.