Europe on $5 a Day
Tuesday, 19 November 2024Arthur Frommer, the pioneering author of Europe on $5 a Day, died at the age of 95 on 18 November 2024.
The Guardian wrote that his book’s advice ‘became so standard that it’s hard to remember how radical it seemed in the days before discount flights and backpacks.’ The article goes on to quote me “It was really pioneering stuff,” Tony Wheeler, founder of the Lonely Planet guidebook company, said in an interview in 2013. Before Frommer, Wheeler said, you could find guidebooks “that would tell you everything about the church or the temple ruin. But the idea that you wanted to eat somewhere and find a hotel or get from A to B – well, I’ve got a huge amount of respect for Arthur.”
Frommer had an amazing start to his groundbreaking guidebook. He was a GI in the American army in Germany in 1953 and most of his fellow GIs ’never left the barracks.’ Arthur certainly did, he explored Europe every time he got a break and in 1955 self-published The GI’s Guide to Travelling in Europe which sold (and sold out) through the army base stores, the PXs.
Two years later Frommer published Europe on $5 a Day. On the cover of those first editions the $5 was written out as ‘5 dollars’ because that made it more efficient for bookshops to catalogue!
