I used to have these old guidebooks of London and Paris that had paragraph blurbs about every establishment on particular streets. That probably doesn't exist now because it's a bad idea: as far as a guidebook it's pretty useless since it will get out of date so quickly and covers such a small proportion geographically. But I used to love those books and just read it for fun totally not with the intention of going to Paris or London but just to get that sweet, sweet specificity.
yeah I occasionally unearth books from the 90s back when they put a lot of stuff in print because how else were people going to find out about it?
I had a book detailing which pokemon cards were worth about how much money and so on (I didn’t buy any pokemon singles, I think I just liked looking at that kind of stuff). and while I’m sure the market moved enough that that book was a bit out of date by the time it hit print, nonetheless, I’m a bit nostalgic for an era when the world moved maybe just a little slower, such that it was even plausible to someone that this was the sort of information you might be able to get from a printed book
InQuest magazine was a thing in the 90s for basically doing that with CCG cards every month (after the model of the same publisher’s Wizard, which did it for comics)