Take Lonely Planet, whose founders were said to have stayed up nights stapling their first travel guides together round the kitchen table.

For the three publishers of a new set of Melbourne city walking guides, the backstory begins with the fight to save an important city building.

The building was Total House, built in 1964: seven levels of car parking below, four levels of offices above, a well-known nightclub in the basement.

"It's often overlooked because of the shitty car park," says David Roper, the co-founder of Crumpler​. Its offices are in Total House – which was almost demolished to make way for a 60-storey apartment tower.

Roper met filmmaker Jacques Sheard​ there after the successful campaign to get the landmark modernist building heritage listed in 2014.

Total House is one of 25 buildings profiled in the first of three Melbourne guidebooks – Footpath Guides –  that Roper, Sheard and designer Sonia Post produced just before Christmas.

The illustrated guides are small enough to fit in a pocket, allowing readers to take a one- to two-hour walk around parts of Melbourne, to find out about three distinct architectural eras spanning the 1850s to the 1970s.

The first book details Melbourne's "International Style" modernist buildings from 1950 to 1970. Its walking tour includes a lunch stop at Pellegrini's Espresso Bar in Bourke Street, which opened in 1954.

The second looks at 15 buildings by Joseph Reed, Melbourne's most influential Victorian-era architect, including the Royal Exhibition Building, Trades Hall, the State Library and Melbourne Town Hall.

The final guide is a stroll around St Kilda, looking at its eclectic architecture ranging from Edwardian and Victorian mansions to art deco and Spanish Mission apartments, through to mid-century modern flats.

While they were writing about the city's modernist heritage for the first book, one of the buildings included – the OPSM building in Collins Street – was demolished for offices and apartments.

It underscored their point: that modernist architecture in Australia is a largely unprotected species.

Roper hopes the books can help give residents and visitors a better appreciation of how rich Melbourne is with beautifully designed buildings. "We're not activists. I used to be a bike courier so I was in and out of these buildings every day." On those trips, he learned to better appreciate Melbourne's architecture.

Roper says they decided to do the books when they found nothing else like it. There were books aplenty on Melbourne's buildings, he says. "But nothing that was accessible and bit more poppy that you could just carry around and has some detail – just enough to whet the appetite."