In the ’70s and ’80s, Lonely Planet, Moon Publications, and Rough Guides were pioneers of a new breed of guidebooks that emphasized alternative budget travel, which continued the work of opening the world that had begun with the Fodor’s and Frommer’s guides. During his search for a distributor, Rick Steves slept on my front porch in Chico. At one point in the 1980s, Moon had just as many titles as Lonely Planet and was even the sole distributor of LP guides in the U.S. Publishing 65 guides under my ownership, we had our triumphs, our bestsellers. Even though we were a small press on the fringe of a huge travel book industry dominated by publishing giants like Random House, we produced highly original, innovative products because we learned the hard way, made all the mistakes, learned all the lessons. Looking back on it all, Moon was not one of the big players, but we had a venerable origin story and a respectable pedigree as one of the early publishers of guidebooks for independent budget travelers. Moon Travel Guides are now part of the Hachette Book Group and are based in Berkeley, California. By 1997, I had divested myself of all ownership shares in the company. In the mid-1990s, a group of New Yorkers from hell cured me from ever wanting to lead another tour again in my life.įinally, in the late 1980s, with print bills mounting and payrolls not being met, I was forced to start selling my interest in Moon Publications to a Hong Kong-based publisher. I’ve visited both Komodo Island and the orangutan rehabilitation center Tanjung Puting in central Borneo each 14 times. There were also long absences leading adventure tours all over Indonesia for U.S.-based tour companies. My focus was always on making my Indonesia guide bigger and better. With all the time I was spending updating my own guidebook, I couldn’t nurture and grow the company. Photo © Bill Dalton.īack in Chico, Moon Publications was growing, but I left no instruction manual on how to run a guidebook publishing company. Leading a tour in New Guinea in the 1980s. I considered it a badge of honor to have my book banned. I was once detained and interrogated in Sumatra, and in Java, the police followed me around on a motorbike. The guide had to be wrapped in a fake cover to get it past customs or else it would be routinely confiscated. Copies had to be smuggled into Indonesia. My Indonesia Handbook was banned for 17 of those years because of what I wrote about the country’s corrupt army and the president’s wife. On the way, I stopped to visit an old army buddy in Chico, California. After publishing the new edition a year and a half later, we left Michigan with the intention of traveling to the Philippines to write a guidebook to that country. We stayed over my sister’s pottery studio in Birmingham, Michigan, and started work on the second edition of Indonesia Handbook and on a new groundbreaking guide to the South Pacific with David Stanley. (I didn’t know that he would be so ornery as to live for another 26 years.) I wanted to make sure that I caught my father before he died. I returned to the States in 1976 after an absence of 12 years, having found out in a phone booth on a cold winter’s night in Sydney that my mother had died two weeks earlier. The Beginning of an Era The early days at Moon Publications.
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