The Rough Guide celebrates a quarter of a century of publication this year - we help celebrate with twenty-five things you didn’t know you didn't know about the ever growing range of Rough Guides.
Publishers Mark Ellingham and Martin Dunford met in Greece, in 1982, when Mark was
researching the first Rough Guide to Greece.
In 1982, 7,000 copies of the first Rough Guide to Greece were sold. The book was 224 pages long and priced £3.99. In 2006 the 11th edition of the Rough Guide to Greece, £14.99, was 1,176 pages long and, to date, has sold 74,361 copies.
Rough Guides have now sold more than 30 million books.
The first Rough Guide to Greece featured hand-drawn maps and was put together on a well travelled portable typewriter. By contrast, the new Rough Guide to World Party is in full-colour and has been designed and laid out in-house using Adobe InDesign and state-of-the-art four colour digital equipment.
Mark and Martin’s current mega-project is a Rough Guide to the World, which will be published later this year. Between them both, they have worked at Rough Guides for a total of 49 years!
The bestselling travel Rough Guide is Italy, although it varies each year. Other contenders are Spain, France and New Zealand.
Authors used to be selected by a gruelling interview technique known as ‘the pub test’ – if they engaged the editors over a few drinks they were in. The publishers tell us this technique has been refined over recent years.
Rough Guides and Lonely Planet first published a guidebook to the same destination in 1990 when they both published guides to China, a country which, at the time, was some way off the usual travel map.
World Music is very much part of Rough Guides’ soul. The first reference title was the Rough Guide to World Music, published 1984. Today over 200 Rough Guide CDs are produced by World Music Network with titles ranging from Merengue to the music of Iran.
Rough Guides’ bestselling title of all time is The Rough Guide to the Internet (with 3 million copies sold). First published in 1985, it is now updated and re-published annually.
The Rough Guide name has been pinched by a lot of pirates over the years, including the Church of England who produced a bootleg 'Rough Guide to Marriage'. Rough Guides refrained from any legal action...
The Rough Guide the public most suggest the team do is Namibia.
The founders of Rough Guides have vowed NEVER to do the Rough Guide to Golf!
Rough Guide founders, Mark Ellingham and Martin Dunford are still co-authors of the books they first wrote 25 years ago: The Rough Guide to Greece and The Rough Guide to Spain.
In partnership with the World Mapping Project, a consortium of German cartographers, Rough Guides have also launched a new series maps on rip-proof Polyart™ paper. These are state of the art, printed on waterproof paper and set a new benchmark in cartography. Gone are the days of ripping up maps!
The largest Rough Guide travel book is India, which runs to nearly 1500 pages and around a million words.
Rough Guides has featured in a question posed by Jeremy Paxman to students on the BBC’s University Challenge quiz. I'll have to hurry you!
Rough Guides will be producing a book on the iPhone within weeks of its launch this year.
Rough Guides publish more than 50 of their titles online, in their entirety, and each of the directions guides can be downloaded for computers or palm pilots.
Rough Guide books have been used in the Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts film Notting Hill (Julia Robert’s character choose the Rough Guide to San Francisco), Coronation Street (Curly was given the France book by his girlfriend Michelle), the hilarious sitcom Green Wing (Sue White refers to it in the first 2 episodes of Season 2) and Absolutely Fabulous (Saffie referred constantly to our Morocco book on a trip with her mum to Marrakesh).
Rough Guides have published more than 200 travel titles and 150 reference titles. All but a handful remain in print, in new updated editions.
Quirkier Rough Guide titles over the years have include: Cult Football, James Bond, Lord of the Rings, The Millenium, Drum’n’Bass, Gay & Lesbian Australia and Mediterranean Wildlife.
Rough Guide author Chris Stewart (Spain/China) was the original drummer in Genesis.
The Rough Guide TV show ran for eight years in the UK and presenter Magenta Devine never took her shades off once.
Celebrity fans include Dermot O’Leary, Paul Merton, Michael Palin (Monty Python's Flying Circus, Ripping Yarns) and Tales From A Small Island/Down Under author Bill Bryson who recently commented: “Rough Guides are consistently readable, informed and, most crucially, reliable”.
For more information on the vast number of
Rough Guide books available, visit:
www.roughguides.com
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