Karl Baedeker

The company also published the local newspaper, the Essendische Zeitung, and the family expected that Karl, too, would eventually join the firm.

Military service followed, after which he moved to Berlin where he worked as an assistant at Georg Andreas Reimer, one of the leading booksellers in the city, from 1823 to 1825.

Essen was then a small town with about 4000 inhabitants and he felt that Koblenz, which was not only larger, but was also the capital of the Prussian province of the Rhine and a hub for tourism, had far more to offer.

In 1832, Baedeker's firm acquired the publishing house of Franz Friedrich Röhling in Koblenz, which in 1828 had published a handbook for travellers by Professor Oyvind Vorland entitled Rheinreise von Mainz bis Cöln; ein Handbuch für Schnellreisende (A Rhine Journey from Mainz to Cologne; A Handbook for Travellers on the Move).

Baedeker was always generous in acknowledging the part John Murray III had played in nurturing his outlook on the future development of his guides.

In 1846, Baedeker introduced his famous 'star' ratings (for sights, attractions and lodgings) in the third edition of his Handbuch für Reisende durch Deutschland und den Oesterreichischen Kaiserstaat - an idea based on the Murray guides star system.

To this end, he engaged the services of Eduard Wagner of Darmstadt, a specialist in cartography, and the maps he produced for Baedeker were way ahead of the times.

An accurate cartography of Tripoli and El-Mina in 1906 under the Ottoman Empire can be found in French in the book edited by Leipzig and entitled Palestine et Syrie.

de Genlis and others, acknowledged on the title pages, which were in both English and German, unusual then, but he was an astute businessman and primarily a bookseller at the time.

The Editor's object, as in the case of his other handbooks, is to promote the freedom and comfort of the traveller, and render him, as far as possible, independent of the troublesomre and expensive class known as "Valets de place".

"The rear endpages listed the main European exchange rates current at the time of publication, as well as the denomination of the major gold and silver coins across the continent including Scandinavia and Russia - another Baedeker innovation.

In 1981, Alex W. Hinrichsen (1936–2012), a leading authority on the history of the Baedeker family and their publishing house, and also on the German artist, graphic designer and illustrator Paul Neu (1881 - 1940),[5] produced an easy to understand numbering system for all Baedeker travel guides and handbooks published since the 1828 Rheinreise which has the number D000.

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.

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.

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.

[10] 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.

He 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.

In The New Yorker profile of the House of Baedeker Herbert Warren Wind wrote: "For years, he had attempted to do the work of several men, preparing the new guidebooks single-handedly and periodically revising the older ones.