Travel Before Guidebooks

At The Guardian's Travel Blog, the cleverly named "Travelog", Michael Cross remembers global travel before guidebooks were standard fare. I tend to be pretty blase about guidebooks. I'll usually travel with one, and depending on the location they can provide anything from piece of mind to smart suggestions to useless and outdated information, but I'm also pretty comfortable going off book and letting the road take me wherever it leads. I don't see any particular virtue in either using or avoiding guidebooks. To locals everyone is a tourist outside of their own home town, after all.