Lost Companion
The Companion Guide to Paris. By Vincent Cronin. (Collins, 25s.) The Companion Guide to the Greek Islands. By Ernie Bradford. (Collins, 25s.) FOR more years than I care to remember I have depended for solitary explorations of Paris upon a faded Guide Bleu full of outdated scribbles about where to eat for 100 francs, when there were 400 francs to the pound. The main use of the book was its maps of districts, for it contained more detailed information than anyone was ever likely to need. Now Collins have begun a series of guides which seem to be the perfect compromise between the pocket encyclopxdia and the nostalgic essay.
Among the first are Vincent Cronin's guide to Paris and Archibald Lyall's to the south of France. Perhaps they will not please everybody, but most travellers who feel that they would like an unobtrusive, readable guidebook that is also a handsome addition to their travel library will jump at them, for at last a publisher has had the imagination to provide this ideal com- promise. The maps may not show you the way to your friend's flat in the Seizieme, but they are adequate if you arc tracking down the Hotel de Rohan or the Muscle de Cluny or trying to find your way through Perpignan rather than about it.
What does the traveller ask from a guide- book? Completeness? Let's be realistic. How many of us ever have the time to test a guide to the full? Oh yes, there's the odd occasion when just the thing we want is missing, and somebody is going to find one or other of these companion guides deficient in detail somewhere, some time. But each one of them reads as if it had been written by someone completely in love with his chosen region— as indeed they have.
Take Mr. Ernie Bradford's closing sentences. 'The islands of Greece are more than a geo- graphical entity. They are a climate of the heart.' He doesn't, of course, sustain such a high emotional tone throughout, any more than his collaborators. The strain would be too much for reader and writer. But there is an atmosphere that savours of a nice blend of Never on Sunday and Professor Kitto. Some of us are going to be cross that Mr. Bradford spends more time on Corfu than on Crete, flits about in his own yacht, when we have to struggle out to-each island from the Pirmus on public steamers packed with pilgrims, chickens and bearded rucksack-wielders, and talks about ouzo pages before he tells us what it is. Still, you can always
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