I am a lucky bastard. It’s true. Unlike most of my previous summers, instead of a few weekends under canvas listening to students singing Gay Bar by Electric Six at 4am, I am going on a real life aeroplane to Burning Man in Nevada, where I plan to frolic naked in midnight dust-storms and take part in a spiritual bonding ceremony with a dude called Firefly.

You think I’m joking.

Before any of the naked frolicking kicks in though, I’ve got a few sensible days in San Francisco planned, or rather, not planned at all, for until yesterday I was sans travel guide.

When you have taken an ethical oath to eschew all new books, there is only really one decision to make on the subject of travel guides. Do you go purely electronic, committing the opening hours of tourist attractions to memory and relying on your phone’s somewhat unreliable GPS function to get around, or do you take a chance and buy a second-hand guidebook that tells you about some brilliant places which closed down three summers ago?

I must say, I very nearly went for the first option, when tracking down any kind of guidebook more recent that 1992 proved super-tough. I requested several on Read It Swap It, but they were generally from full-on traveller types who also had books about Antarctica, Bhutan and the Congo listed. I’m only offering some Dan Rhodes and a battered edition of Vanity Fair right now, so my requests were repeatedly denied.

Then I spent the best part of an afternoon trawling though Ebay but it yielded surprising few viable results. There were loads of maps and city plans, and something called ‘SF Modern Tramway & Light Rail Transit 1986’ but everything that looked like it could be a decent guidebook turned out to be new rather than used, and that’s against the rules.

Everything apart from one, thankfully. The Time Out guide that’s pictured above (along with my suitcase, passport and a bottle of suncream that will be entirely superfluous because the San Francisco fog apparently obliterates any perilous UV rays) was originally published in 2000, so while the hotel rates might now come with a pinch of inflation, I don’t believe there have been any major earthquakes since then. Haight-Ashbury’s still there from what I gather, and Golden Gate Park, and if none of the maps are current, I’ll probably just disappear into the Napa Valley with a corkscrew and an open mind.

Time Out Guide To San Francisco
Publication date: 2000
Publisher: Penguin
Price then: £10.99
Price now: 99p
Bought from: Ebay

From the ‘History’ chapter: “The rip snaked inland, tearing a gash now known as the San Andreas Fault down the coastline. Cliffs appeared from nowhere, cracks yawned, ancient redwoods toppled and the dome of the 29-year-old City Hall collapsed like a soufflé.”