Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet is a travel guidebook publisher that began in 1973 when Tony and Maureen Wheeler, newly settled in Sydney after an overland journey from London across Asia, wrote and hand-stapled a 96-page guide titled Across Asia on the Cheap at their kitchen table. They named the company after a misheard lyric in a song by Joe Cocker. A second book on South-East Asia followed in 1975, a guidebook on India brought financial security around 1980, and sales offices opened in the United States in 1984 and the United Kingdom in 1990. The company launched a web site in 1994 and began diversifying in 2000. According to the cited history, written around 2001, it was a private company with about 400 employees, offices in Melbourne, Oakland, Paris and London, and more than 600 books in print.