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Baedeker set for New Year return

29.11.07 | Victoria Arnstein

The Baedeker travel guides, absent from the UK trade for the past five years, will be back in bookshops from January in revamped form.

Although the Baedeker brand has remained popular in Germany, UK distribution stopped five years ago owing to heavy competition in the market. The revamp includes 3-D images on laminated fold-out pages, a fully-indexed pull-out map and an A–Z format. The books will retail at between £12.99 for a city guide and £16.99 for a regional guide.

Ian MacDonald, sales and marketing director at Baedeker’s UK distributor, GeoCenter, said that the trade reception had been good so far. "Our sales team has sold into all of [our] accounts and there has been a good response from the chains," he said. "When we took this on, we knew there would be a market out there saying: 'The last thing we need is another [travel] series.' So we waited until we had finished copies of the guide for our reps, and that made a big difference."

The first 12 guides, including Dubai, Mexico and Thailand, will be available from 7th January. A further 12 titles will be released later in the year. "We will probably end up after three years with about 80 titles, so it is a big investment for us, but we really believe in the product," MacDonald added.

The first Baedeker was published in Prussia in 1835 and it became a strong brand, with "baedekering" entering the Collins and other English dictionaries as a verb meaning "to travel to a country for the purpose of writing".

• Baedeker
• travel guides
• Victoria Arnstein