The Rough Guide to Barcelona 8 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

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A Rough Guide to Rough Guides

Published in 1982, the first Rough Guide – to Greece – was a student scheme

that became a publishing phenomenon. Mark Ellingham, a recent graduate in

English from Bristol University, had been travelling in Greece the previous summer

and couldn’t find the right guidebook. With a small group of friends he wrote his

own guide, combining a highly contemporary, journalistic style with a thoroughly

practical approach to travellers’ needs.

The immediate success of the book spawned a series that rapidly covered dozens

of destinations. And, in addition to impecunious backpackers, Rough Guides

soon acquired a much broader and older readership that relished the guides’ wit

and inquisitiveness as much as their enthusiastic, critical approach and value-for-

money ethos.

These days, Rough Guides include recommendations from shoestring to luxury

and cover more than 200 destinations around the globe, including almost every

country in the Americas and Europe, more than half of Africa and most of Asia and

Australasia. Our ever-growing team of authors and photographers is spread all

over the world, particularly in Europe, the USA and Australia.

In the early 1990s, Rough Guides branched out of travel, with the publication of

Rough Guides to World Music, Classical Music and the Internet. All three have

become benchmark titles in their fields, spearheading the publication of a wide

range of books under the Rough Guide name.

Including the travel series, Rough Guides now number more than 350 titles,

covering: phrasebooks, waterproof maps, music guides from Opera to Heavy

Metal, reference works as diverse as Conspiracy Theories and Shakespeare, and

popular culture books from iPods to Poker. Rough Guides also produce a series of

more than 120 World Music CDs in partnership with World Music Network.

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