Savvy Travelers

By Lisa McLaughlin

Tired of lugging around those clunky, fact-packed travel guides that practically scream, "Look at me! I'm a tourist"? For the discreet visitor who prefers to blend in, there's a new breed of small, specialized and often offbeat urban guides designed to show you how to shop, eat and look like a hip native.

CREATE YOUR OWN GUIDE

The Moleskine City Notebooks put a do-it-yourself twist on trip planning. The sleek travel diaries cover detailed street and transit maps with translucent overlays that make it easy to plan and trace your path. The rest of the book is blank so you can fill it with your memories.

DESIGN CONSCIOUS

The ultra-stylish Wallpaper City Guides brazenly skip the well-trod tourist spots to instead focus on what interests the authors: iconic architecture, hot shopping venues, glamorous hotels and the hippest clubs and restaurants in 20 design-conscious cities. The Paris guide won't help you locate the Eiffel Tower, but it will show you how to find a dozen of Le Corbusier's architectural gems.

FREE FOOD

Pop-music icon MTV and travel-guide stalwart Frommer's have joined unlikely forces to create the MTV Guide series aimed at the young at heart and budget-challenged. The books are packed with tips on where to find the cheapest digs, where to eat well for less than $10, which bars offer complimentary food and where to find offbeat adventure sports like kayaking in Italy or surfing off Ireland's unsunny coast of Clare.

BUY LOCAL

If you are looking for a monument, an art museum or the best route to the airport, you are out of luck with the eat.shop guides. But if you absolutely must find the best cowboy boots in Austin, Texas, a bait-and-tackle shop with high-design sensibilities in Providence, R.I., a Persian ice cream parlor in Hollywood or Japanese tapas in Brooklyn, N.Y., these compact urban guides may be for you. Each volume focuses on 90 locally owned shops or restaurants in cities from Portland, Ore., to Paris.

NEVER OUT OF STYLE

DK's e.guides also make short work of tourist spots, focusing instead on how to live like a native in busy capitals like Paris, London and New York City. The printed editions list everything from the chicest restaurant to the best bookshop. They also provide a password that lets you log on to a frequently updated website so you don't have to worry about getting there to find your spot closed. Or worse, no longer cool.

THE SHORTLIST

Time Out magazine is the go-to publication for weekly event listings and reviews in cities around the world. The new Time Out Shortlist guidebooks have expanded on that concept to create pocket-size guides to hip happenings in Paris, New York City, Prague, Barcelona and Rome. Written by local journalists, the books offer up a plugged-in guide to the best clubs, pubs, hotels, shops and events of the moment. While not as fresh as a weekly magazine, the guides will be revised annually to stay up-to-date with the fashions and venues in each city they cover.