Guidebooks are always useful, though generally not exciting to read. When traveling away from home, it is certainly convenient to have lots of facts on hand, so that as a visitor you can know what the locals know. You simply can’t beat a guidebook written by a local.
It’s curious, therefore, that Stackpole Press’s new guidebook, Cape May: The Informed Traveler’s Guide, was written by a writer from Bordentown, a good two hour drive away from Cape May. While the text is lively (for a guidebook) and written quite clearly, alas, the book is filled with mistakes and contradictions. Catching several in the first few pages, I decided to make notes on significant errors. I stopped after counting 14 in the first 34 pages. Goodness gracious, does nobody fact check anymore?
At one point Vanthia’s restaurant is moved from its proper place in West Cape May to the Cape May City waterfront next to the Convention Center (where, in actuality, Tisha’s is located), though later it’s back at Broadway and Sunset in West Cape May. The concrete ship is alternately called a freighter and a battleship, and it’s described first as famous and later as infamous. Dune grass is erroneously called eel grass, which is a submerged aquatic plant that could never grow on the sand. Perhaps most egregiously, if you follow this book’s directions into town from the Garden State Parkway, you’ll end up going to Wildwood Crest.
It goes on and on. The beach at Cape May Point State Park, which faces the Atlantic, is described as being on Delaware Bay. The author mistakenly states that the littoral drift of sand along the southern New Jersey shore moves from south to north; it moves the other way. It is suggested that some Cape May establishments have phone numbers with the area code of 856; you’ve got to go to Vineland for that code, it’s certainly not used in Cape May. Even Uncle Bill’s Pancake House has its name changed to “Uncle Billy’s.”
Okay, I’ll admit that a lot of the mistakes are trivial, but they do make me wonder about the veracity of everything else in the book. I’m afraid I even find the specific guidebook listings lacking. Good guidebooks are complete, or nearly so. Cape May: The Informed Traveler’s Guide includes a curiously small number of shopping, eating, and lodging establishments. The author lavishly praises most of the businesses that are included, making me wonder if this isn’t just a book of advertisements. Cape May certainly has more than 10 restaurants, 22 lodgings, and 13 retail establishments, but that’s all that are listed here.
Even the section on festivals and special events is incomplete. Just about every offering of the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts is included (I’m surprised their catalog wasn’t listed in the bibliography – oh yeah, there is no bibliography), but the two annual jazz festivals, the annual film festival, NJ Audubon’s Autumn Weekend / THE Bird Show, and many other major events are missing from this guide. Birds and nature are barely mentioned at all. Cape May Bird Observatory? Missing.
So what’s here? A bit of lore about the town is included, along with some info about a seemingly random selection of Cape May events and businesses, and a bunch of pretty pictures (many provided by the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts – what a surprise!). Call it the “Marginally Informed Traveler’s Guide.” Change the back cover blurb from describing the book as an “Insider’s guide,” to the “Outsider’s guide.” It’s certainly hard to justify the back cover claim of this volume as, “An essential companion for every vacationer.” Oh well, since the directions don’t actually get you into Cape May, I guess the users of this book won’t find anything to criticize.
Roberts, Russell. Cape May: The Informed Traveler’s Guide. Mechanicsburg, PA, Stackpole Books, 2008. 160 pages, $19.95 paper. ISBN-10: 0-8117-3375-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-3375-5.