Living: Access Reinvents the Guidebook

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Opening up cities block by block, door by door

Like traveler's checks and Lomotil, guidebooks are a necessary nuisance. All too often the information they contain is inadequate, ill written and, worst of all, irrationally organized. Yet how else to find out which museum has the Raphaels and where they serve good veal? In a radical approach to the genre, a two-year-old Los Angeles publishing company named AccessPress Ltd. has, under the guidance of its founder, Architect-Cartographer Richard Saul Wurman, 49, reinvented the wheel with a series of compact volumes that open up cities through striking graphics, terse copy and a tight format.

Most guidebooks, claims Wurman, "ghettoize information," putting hotels, restaurants, shopping, museums, nightclubs and other attractions in separate sections. By contrast, Access guides note them as an alert pedestrian would, door by door, block by block. To make sites easier to spot on the page, they are color-coded (red for restaurants and nightlife, green for parks, and so on) and profusely illustrated. The exquisitely limned maps are models of graceful lucidity.

This discipline is particularly evident in the books' capsule architectural notes (color-coded blue) on outstanding buildings, a subject often neglected by other guides. The NYC Access entry on the design of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel ("an understated and elegantly detailed composition") reports such esoteric details as the underground railroad station from which Franklin Roosevelt was whisked to his suite by a secret elevator. The books abound in learned footnotes and pleasant trivia (the pianist at the Waldorf's Peacock Alley uses an instrument once owned by Cole Porter, who lived in the hotel). New York restaurant critiques, by Daily News Food Editor Arthur Schwartz, are deft and sometimes devastating. At the toplofty "21" Club, the guide observes, "it is surprising how democratic the cooks and waiters are: no one gets terrific food or service."

Other grace notes on the "best" New York has to offer are contributed by old hands such as Jimmy Breslin, Beverly Sills and Walter Cronkite. But the bulk of the text is prepared by local experts and visiting writers who often have a fresher eye for detail than most natives. In every section, one guiding spirit can be detected: Wurman's childhood hero, Paul Klee. He explains, "Klee's paintings had a shorthand that described action, feeling, color, mood. They were not about painting but communication and visual literacy." The overall technique could be a model for future encyclopedias. In Hawaii Access, for example, there are entries on surfing and shells that are definitive in guidebook terms. San Francisco Access includes such regional lore as the mechanics of the cable car and the winemaking process.

Wurman started AccessPress when he moved to Los Angeles, found himself lost in the maze of freeways and suburbs, and assumed that many other people must be puzzled too. Publishing experts counseled him to print no more than 5,000 copies of his prototype guide; he sold 60,000. Access guides on how to cope with San Francisco, Hawaii, New York City and even football followed, with total sales of some 580,000. New guides to Washington, D.C., dogs and baseball are now out, with future fields as bright as a Klee painting.