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suggested, could be observed in many areas of urban life, from sidewalks and lighting to a sewer

system and proper sanitary facilities. 100 As such, guidebooks provided yet another way of

distinguishing between positive and negative versions of modernity in the region’s towns.

Through their depictions of urban spaces, the authors also suggested the practical usefulness

of guidebooks, not only to outside visitors but also to local populations who were themselves

learning how a modern town was supposed to work. Indeed, while the ideal reader could be imagined

as an outsider who needed information about lodging, restaurants, and entertainment, this figure

might also be a Polish-speaking urban inhabitant who was beginning to fit himself (or herself) into

the spatial and temporal order of civilization—what Nathaniel Wood calls, in the context of pre-First

World War Kraków, an “interurban matrix of words and images describing the modern world.” 101 An

important part of the creation of texts for tourists certainly revolved around informational

standardization. In the Równe guidebook, for instance, a municipal map used the official Polish

names of the streets, rather than older Russian—or even unofficial local—names, which some

inhabitants might have continued to use. Meanwhile, a directory of restaurants, hotels, cinemas,

coffee shops, and places of importance suggested the infrastructural mapping of the town for an

urban population that had both leisure time and some disposable capital. Finally, a series of

timetables, which detailed when buses and trains arrived and departed, linked Równe with modern

transportation initiatives that superseded the traditional horse-and-cart and suggested a standardized

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relationship to national, and even international, time.

Just as the contents of guidebooks suggested that towns could become the models of

modernity that Polish elites had long hoped for, however, they also implied that peripheral rural

spaces remained precariously balanced between backwardness and internal exoticism. In something

100 Ibid., 8.
101 Wood, Becoming Metropolitan, 51.
102 Ilustrowany przewodnik po mieście Równem.

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