There are many guidebooks to Montreal and this is a look at only a small selection of them. These are books that go a step beyond the standard guides and look at the city from new perspectives or offer very good information in specific areas.

One of the attractive Ulysse travel book series, locally produced in both English and French editions, the Montreal guide has a reliable, no-nonsense approach to the city, with maps, listings of restaurants, hotels and other lodgings, shopping areas, a historical backgrounder and an exhaustive general information section. The heart of the book is a series of walking tours, starting with the tourist basics of Old Montreal and the downtown core, but - and this is the book’s great strength - going on to cover pretty much every other neighbourhood on the island. Even as a lifelong Montrealer I found plenty of interesting details here I hadn’t known before, and pointers to notable features in the less well-trodden neighbourhoods. Return visitors to the city might enjoy exploring Maisonneuve, Plateau Mont-Royal or Little Italy instead of seeing the standard sights over again, and this book will help guide them off the beaten path. Colour photos and line drawings.

Ninety restaurants offering dinners at $15 and under are listed in this indispensable guide to eating well and variously without maxing out the plastic. The book is arranged alphabetically, but there are handy cross-indexes that also classify restaurants by neighbourhood and regional cuisine so you can apply the search criteria of your choice. With an amusing Josh Freed cadenza on the difficulty of looking up restaurant names in a bilingual city. Useful for visitors and locals alike.

One of the newer entries in the New York-based Zagat series, the Montreal edition contains a quirky selection of restaurants and short but pertinent lists of bars and clubs, general city attractions and hotels, rated in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has seen any other Zagat production, but easily graspable even if you haven't. The book has the typical minimal Zagat design. A page of maps of the denser restaurant areas and some cross-indexed lists of restos by cuisine and location are useful features and it's very easy to find the top-rated establishments in every category.

Subtitled “An Opinionated Guide to the Downtown Squares, Churches, and Underground City” this little 80-page book is filled out with a few listings of bars, tourist bureaus and websites, but its chief charm is Hustak’s own eclectic knowledge of the history and development of the downtown core. It’s organized in several walking tours, each with specific directions and detailed commentary. The book is especially useful as a guide to Montreal’s famous Underground City. There are black-and-white photos of buildings and vistas past and present, and several maps. A nice little book, small enough to pack alongside more generic guidebooks, and a pleasure for anyone with an interest in urban textures and history.

Another “opinionated guide” by Alan Hustak, this 90-page book covers the oldest parts of Montreal in the same spirit as Hustak’s Downtown book. There’s a lot of interesting and curious data to be found here that illuminate the gray stones of Old Montreal with the gleam of history and legend. Photos both old and new, plus maps, website and restaurant listings.

This high-spirited book is the ultimate insider’s inside look at Montreal’s rakish history. The Gravenor brothers evict the skeletons from our collective closet and dance with them in the street. There are some maps and plenty of photos, but the chapters include items like Media and Entertainment and Notoriety in addition to other more standard guidebook fare. The book offers a densely packed selection of trivia, unofficial history, true crime, old scandals and urban legends, anecdotes about Montrealers famous and infamous, and useful lists like “What you can get away with” and “FLQ: Where Are They Now?” I enjoyed this book immensely despite a book design that would give Edward Tufte a coronary: typeset in overly tight Futura, a pair of reading glasses should be issued with every copy. There are plenty of illustrations and some strangely oriented maps. Kristian and J.D. also run the blog Coolopolis, which continues the theme of Montreal and its quirkier stories.

ECW Press has been promising an updated edition of Secret Montreal on and off for awhile, but even the 1997 edition is worth a look, even if some of the entries are out of date. It’s a pretty book, elegantly typeset in two colours and printed on thick matte paper, and with ineffably arty captionless photographic illustrations. Categories include Cadavers, Espionage, Exotica and Imbibing as well as more conventional listings. Entries are well edited with addresses and phone numbers for each “secret” location discussed.

Disclosure up front here: I drew the maps for these books, published in 1997 and 1999. But I didn’t have anything to do with providing the rest of the contents, which are excellent listings of places to go and things to do. These are a good resource for families with kids to entertain, or locals with out-of-town guests to show around. They introduce fun features of Montreal’s far-flung neighbourhoods and surrounding towns and countryside in a well-designed and approachable format. Inevitably some of the information is out of date now, so don’t base any excursions on these books before phoning first.

– Kate McDonnell