Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb — Read

Foreword. -- It has always seemed to me that the principal drawback / about the average guidebook is that it is over-freighted with facts. / Guidebooks heretofore have made a specialty of facts -- have abounded in / them; facts to be found on every page and in every paragraph. Reading / such a work, you imagine that the besotted author said to himself, "I / will just naturally fill this thing chock-full of facts" -- and then went / and did so to the extent of a prolonged debauch.

Now personally I would be the last one in the world to decry facts as / such. In the abstract I have the highest opinion of them. But facts, / as someone has said, are stubborn things; and stubborn things, like / stubborn people, are frequently tiresome. So it occurred to me that / possibly there might be room for a guidebook on foreign travel which / would not have a single indubitable fact concealed anywhere about its / person. I have even dared to hope there might be an actual demand on / the part of the general public for such a guidebook. I shall endeavor to / meet that desire -- if it exists.