The History of The Michelin Guide

Clermont-Ferrand, August 1900. André and Édouard Michelin had built a tyre company here in 1889, and now they had a stranger idea: give away a book to help people drive further, so their tyres would wear out sooner and need replacing. The pocket-sized red guide ran to roughly 35,000 free copies, at a moment when fewer than 3,000 cars existed on all of French roads. Inside were maps, instructions for patching a punctured tyre, lists of petrol stations and garages, and addresses of hotels and restaurants where a motorist might rest. André Michelin wrote a preface promising, in effect, that the book would last as long as the century. Nobody who read it that August could have guessed how literally true that would turn out to be. The guide's mascot began taking shape around the same years, born from a pile of stacked tyres that someone thought looked uncannily like a standing man. Michelin's engineers and illustrators built him into Bibendum, the figure who would ride on every cover for the next hundred-plus years. Success abroad followed fast: a Belgian edition in 1904, then Algeria and Tunisia in 1907, the Alps and Rhine region in 1908, and the British Isles in 1911. What started as a giveaway pinned to tyre sales was already, within a decade, a small international network of guidebooks, still free, still stuffed with practical motoring advice, still years away from judging a single plate of food.