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Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Tuesday

the 28th of May and published this month a fascinating book called Taking the Risk, My Adventures in

Travel and Publishing. The author is none other than Hillary Bratt, who has been a

fixture in travel publishing for an astonishing 50 years. I caught up with her at Stamford's,

the world's biggest travel guide and map shop but i certainly didn't think it

would last one year a little old 50 years so i feel pretty proud tell us about the birth of travel

guides which is completely unintentional like a lot of my travels we found when my ex-husband and I were traveling through

South America, we found there was just nothing on hiking in the Andes, which is what we'd been

doing. And if we met other gringoes, they would take out their notebooks and they'd make notes.

And we thought, oh, you know, maybe we could write an article about this. Wow, a whole article.

And then it turned into it, write a little book.

And we wrote a little book. And we sent it to my mother-in-law, and she had 2,000 copies

printed. And no one else wanted to publish the second edition. So we became publishers.

You make it sound very easy, and the rest is publishing history, but that was in the

1970s when companies such as the Only Planet was starting up. Was that a good thing that

everybody was after travel guise or would you rather have had the market to yourself?

No, I didn't know what a market was in those days except where you could buy guinea

...