The book was to be published in Alexandria and—there being no other guide available in English—the plan was to take advantage of the situation in the aftermath of the war and sell it to the many British soldiers and other functionaries who were coming and going in large numbers to the hospitals and other military facilities. 

However, the publishers—the Alexandria branch of the large English stationery firm of Whitehead Morris—proved extraordinarily dilatory.  After receiving the manuscript at the beginning of 1919, they did not issue the book until the end of 1922, by which time the intended audience had largely dissipated.  An unknown number of books were shipped to London for sale there, and the book was promoted in the spring of 1923 by a small flyer inserted in copies of Pharos and Pharillon.

The city to which Forster's book is a guide is an evocation, a city of the memory, of which only scant physical vestiges remain.  The lighthouse, the library, the tomb of Alexander are rumors rather than remnants.   Today, even the city that Forster saw has largely disappeared.  But while he was there, this city of absence provided Forster a significant and palpable presence.

In an introduction to Michael Haag's 1984 edition of Alexandria, Lawrence Durrell wrote that "the author who was marooned here during the First World War must (one feels it) have been deeply happy, perhaps deeply in love, for his joie de vivre rings out in every affectionate line."   Forster began writing the book during the last half of his stay, when he was in fact deeply in love, having found in Alexandria what he had before been able only to imagine and to evoke in fiction.   He hints at this in the preface to the revised second edition of the book, which appeared in 1938: "The Alexandria I knew and loved belongs to the war-years.  I was very happy there, in the intervals of my work, and gradually fell in love with many of her inhabitants and the whole of her past. . . . I desire to thank certain friends who are no longer alive, but who still inspire me by their genius and charm."