New Jersey: A Guide to Its Present and Past arrived in June 1939 with an unusual ambition for so small a state. Its preface describes the book as an attempt to present not only the background and development of old New Jersey but the rapidly changing scene of the state today — to serve a contemporary need and, at the same time, to preserve the flavor of present-day New Jersey for scholars of the future. The guide was a cooperative product, drawing on field workers, research workers, writers, editors, and specialists in every department of state life.
Most of the material was gathered first-hand: every major city was studied by reporters, and field workers, the editors noted, traveled every foot of the main highways from High Point Park to Cape May. The book carried two sponsors’ forewords. Beatrice Winser, librarian of the Newark Public Library, called the volume a cause for pride to those who love the state, praising the way its collaborators had held beauty and romance in balance with ugliness and the commonplace, refusing to flatter.
The New Jersey Guild Associates, co-sponsors with the library, struck the note that still best captures the guide’s spirit. Highways and wayside taverns are adequately described, they wrote, but this new kind of guide also leads to strange and remote places — detouring from the main traveled roads for unexpected forays to spots that scarcely one tourist in a thousand would find unaided. In a very real sense, they added, the book lifts up familiar, sun-baked stones to reveal the quiet life beneath.
That sense of a densely layered state, half industrial and half pine-barren and shore, organizes the whole. Part One, The General View, opens with “A New Jersey Silhouette” and moves through the natural setting, archeology and the Indians, history, government, industry and commerce, labor, agriculture, transportation, the press, the racial and national groups, folklore, education, religion, and the arts. Part Two profiles the Cities and Towns — Newark, Jersey City, Trenton, Camden, Princeton, Atlantic City, and more than a dozen others — each with its own tour.
The guide’s great length shows in Part Three, the Tours: thirty-seven numbered routes with their lettered branches, a remarkably fine mesh of roads for a state of New Jersey’s size. They run from the George Washington Bridge approaches to the Delaware crossings, down the shore from Sandy Hook to Cape May, and back through the pine barrens, gathering up battlefields, ferry roads, glass towns, and seaside resorts along the way. A chronology, a bibliography, and an index close the volume. The editors, characteristically, hoped that new and revised editions might one day become a New Jersey custom; what survives is their snapshot of 1939, recorded with affection and an unusual willingness to look beneath the everyday surface.