ABSTRACT
The contributions to this volume have tended to underline the role of texts in travel. Texts transmitted knowledge about places and created new travel opportunities. Yet as we take advantage of the richness of textual sources, we have to be careful not to present reading and writing as the paradigmatic means of communication for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Narratives of modernisation still exercise a strong hold on travel research, positing a demise of the personal in travel as in modern life generally. This nal contribution will attempt to strike a balance between texts and other “impersonal” facilitators such as travel agencies and local bureaucrats on the one hand and personal contacts on the other. It argues for the persistent signicance of personal interaction in European travel up to at least the interwar years.1
