Rough Guides
| Parent company | Penguin Random House |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1982 |
| Founder | Mark Ellingham |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Headquarters location | London |
| Nonfiction topics | Travel guidebooks |
| Official website | www |
Rough Guides Ltd is a travel guidebook and reference publisher, owned by Penguin Random House. Their travel titles cover more than 200 destinations, and they are distributed worldwide through the Penguin Group. The series began with the 1982 Rough Guide to Greece, a book conceived by Mark Ellingham, who was dissatisfied with the polarisation of existing guidebooks between cost-obsessed student guides and "heavyweight cultural tomes."
Initially, the series was aimed at low-budget backpackers. The Rough Guides books have incorporated more expensive recommendations since the early 1990s, and books have had colour printing since the late 1990s, which are now marketed to travellers on all budgets. Much of the books' travel content is also available online.
Ellingham left Rough Guides in November 2007, after the company had celebrated "25 Rough Years" with a celebratory series of books, to set up a new green and ethical imprint, GreenProfile, at Profile Books. Rough Guides was run from 2003 until later in the decade by co-founder Martin Dunford (travel) and Andrew Lockett (reference), under the aegis of Penguin before their merger with Random House. It is based at the Penguin offices at 80 Strand, London, with a satellite office in Delhi.
The slogan of Rough Guides is "Make the Most of Your Time on Earth".
Most of the series' early titles were written or edited by John Fisher, Jack Holland and Martin Dunford, who along with Mark Ellingham were co-founders and owners of Rough Guides. In 1995, they negotiated the sale of the series to Penguin Books, a process which was completed in 2002.
In 1994, the first ever non-travel Rough Guides books were published – The Rough Guide to World Music and The Rough Guide to Classical Music. The success of these titles encouraged Rough Guides’ expansion into other areas of publishing to cover a range of reference subjects, including music - covering genres such as world music, rock, hip-hop, jazz, and individual artists – and topics such as film, literature, popular science, ethical living, true crime, Shakespeare, pregnancy and birth, plus the Internet and related subjects such as e-Bay, blogging and iPods.
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