Karl Baedeker - Anecdotal Revelations

Anecdotal Revelations

Books and articles about the rise of the House of Baedeker invariably recount anecdotes about its founder and these are not without substance. He was renowned for his hard and careful work, his high standards, both personal and professional, and for being absolutely incorruptibie.

Baedeker generally went around conducting his research incognito. In an article entitled The Baedeker Guide Books published in the November 1989 issue (68) of the now defunct Book and Magazine Collector, Michael Wild, the Baedeker historian and author of Baedekeriana: An Anthologywrote:

"Karl Baedeker once had occasion to stop at a hotel in Vevey, Switzerland in 1852. In a simple coat, a faded umbrella dangling from its top button and carrying a travelling pouch over his shoulder, he could be nothing but a tourist - and not the sort whom hotel staff fall over themselves to serve. He asked for a nice room with a view over the lake, and was shown a stuffy little hutch in the roof, overlooking the inner courtyard. The porter assured him brusquely that nothing else was available.

Service at supper was slow, but the landlord was quick to push the Visitor's Book under Baedeker's nose and demanded that the entry be made. In silence, the stranger took his pen and wrote, in a clear hand, "Baedeker, Karl, bookseller from Coblence." The consternation in the landlord's face was only replaced by the dreadful pallor which took its place; this was worse than failing to recognise an English lord or even a Russian prince.

Baedeker then laid into him with a catalogue of his shortcomings. The landlord protested feebly, asking "Monsieur Baedeker" to make some allowance for the fact that it was the high season, there were many guests... "Monsieur's" answer was to strip the hotel of its prized star which it had hitherto enjoyed: "a renowned hotel must take extra pains." The landlord pleaded and pleaded, but to no avail. In the next edition of "Schweiz" the star was gone. It has to be added, though, that Baedeker was a just man and he restored the star later on, but only when personally convinced that the hotel was being run according to his high standards."

On September 22 1975, The New Yorker magazine ran a 38-page profile of the "House of Baedeker". Its author, Herbert Warren Wind, had spent a considerable amount of time at the contemporary Baedeker publishers in Germany, researching the history of the firm and gave the following account, related by Gisbert von Vincke, a German Shakespearen scholar, of the famous Milan Cathedral story, which has acquired a legendary status of its own, because of its manifold variations:

"In 1844. when von Vincke was making his way up the stairs to the roof of the Milan Cathedral, his attention was attracted by the man just ahead of him - a stocky fellow of about five feet seven, with broad features and muttonchop whiskers, who at regular intervals reached into his waistcoat pocket with his right hand, plucked out a small object, and deposited it in a trouser pocket. Back at his hotel, von Vincke spotted this man in the dining room and learned from the headwaiter that he was Baedeker. After the meal, he introduced himself to Baedeker amd asked him if he would be kind enough to explain his strange ritual on the cathedral staircase. Oh, Baedeker said with manifest pleasure, he had been counting the steps to the cathedral roof. To guard against losing his count, he had taken the precaution of filling a waistcoat pocket with a supply of pes. After every twenty steps, he had transferred a pea from that pocket to his trouser pocket."

On descending from the roof, Baedeker reversed the pea-transferring process, thus ensuring that there was no error in his calculations. The number of peas multiplied by 20 plus any steps remaining had given him the correct count.

A few years after Karl Baedeker died, the Pall Mall Gazette described a Baedeker guidebook as being singularly accurate and in the English version of Jacques Offenbach's musical La Vie Parisienne this memorable lyric rings out:

Kings and governments may err/ But never Mr.Baedeker.