MICHELIN GUIDE, Michelin. France 1939.

Thirty-Fifth Year. Paris: Services de Tourisme Michelin, 97 Bd. Pereire, 1939. Thick octavo. pp. 1107, with index, abundantly illustrated throughout with hundreds of small city plans, touring maps, road diagrams, hotel classifications, symbols, and route advice. Original red printed limp boards, titled in black with the famous Michelin “Bibendum” motif. Spine similarly lettered, some light edge rubbing and minor surface wear as usual for these wartime-era guides. Contemporary ownership inscription to front endpaper. Internally very good, with the characteristic yellow map endpapers intact and bright.

Restaurants in each town. These appear within the alphabetical town entries, usually after the city plan. They often include: Name of the restaurant, address, seasonal opening dates, type of food, relative price, small symbols indicating quality or comfort 'Les bonnes tables' section Near the front of the guide, Michelin provided a separate list of “Good tables” — essentially recommended dining around France.

Michelin stars - The modern star was introduced in the 1920s and standardised in 1933.

This 1939 issue—published just months before the outbreak of the Second World War—is the final Michelin Guide of the pre-war period and represents the fully developed interwar format: a compact, encyclopaedic road guide designed for the motorist, containing rapid-route charts, snow-route advisories, ferry crossings, customs formalities, official road signs, new Michelin sheet-maps, and detailed city plans for every principal town in France. Gastronomic coverage (“Les bonnes tables”), hotel classifications, spa towns, garages, and recommended tyres are all given with precision, using Michelin’s famous system of symbols. A striking reminder of the extent to which Michelin’s tourist guides were both practical handbooks for the motorist and cultural documents of France on the eve of occupation.

The 1939 guide is also sought after for its historical context: it was part of the same Michelin cartographic corpus consulted by the Allied forces during the 1944 campaigns, owing to the unrivalled accuracy of Michelin’s road surveys. Surviving copies in good condition, with the delicate red covers unfaded, are increasingly uncommon.

The Michelin Guides originated in 1900 as promotional aids intended to encourage motoring—and therefore tyre sales—by providing reliable maps, hotels, mechanics, and touring advice. By the 1920s and 1930s the Guides had evolved into authoritative national motor-tourism manuals. Their precise city plans and route-mapping were so admired that, during the Second World War, Michelin maps were used both by the French government and the Allied military. The pre-war red covers, fragile by design, often suffered heavy wear, making well-preserved examples desirable to collectors of travel literature, automobilia, and cartography. The 1939 Guide, in particular, represents the last peaceful snapshot of France before the wartime hiatus (the next full Guide did not appear until after liberation).

[L3 6A]