Morocco: The Rough Guide

by Mark Ellingham, Shaun McVeigh, Don Grisbrook

The best coverage of Moroccan culture past and present and some of the world's most beautiful Arab cities are presented in this guide.

Genres: Travel

640 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 1998

About the author

Mark Ellingham was born in Wiltshire, UK, in 1959. After leaving Bristol University in 1981, he was unable to find an interesting job and decided to create his own, writing the first Rough Guide (to Greece). He secured a publishing contract – Routledge paying an advance of £900 ($1800) – midway through writing it. The book was an immediate success and Mark and various friends set to work turning the Rough Guides into a series, producing a dozen further titles over the next five years.

In 1985, Mark and a group of Rough Guide writers and editors, including current travel publisher Martin Dunford, bought the series from Routledge and became independent publishers. They developed more than 200 titles, covering travel and reference subjects as diverse as world music and pregnancy, before selling the company to Penguin Books, in 2002.

Mark (and Martin) continued to run Rough Guides’ publishing at Penguin, 25 years on from that first title, and created a new one-off “ultimate travel experience” series – 25s – to mark the anniversary.

Mark is also a contributing editor for the world music magazine, Songlines, a director of the travel magazine, Wanderlust, and co-publisher of Sort Of Books, which have published bestselling books by Chris Stewart and Tove Jansson, among others. He lives in North London with his wife, Natania Jansz, who co-wrote the first Greece book and now runs Sort Of Books, and their son, Miles. Mark says his interests and passions are charted by the titles on the Rough Guide list, ranging through music, film, football, literature and science. He is currently involved in campaigns to raise awareness of the impact of aviation on Climate Change.

Mark left Rough Guides in 2007 but continues to work as a co-editor on the encyclopedic Rough Guide to World Music. He is also a contributing editor at Songlines World Music magazine, and runs a green and ethical publishing list for Profile Books.

Reviews

[Belle Meade School]

916.40438

[Chase Insteadman Mountbatten · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would describe this as the ultimate guide to Morocco. I bought it in Sevilla one day before my first trip there in 2001, a week after the Twin Towers attack. It made me discover the Hotel El Muniria in Tangiers (1, rue magellan) meeting point of the various writers who lived there during the sixties: people like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Burroughs stayed in El Muniria for a while where he is said to have written, or at least finished, his Naked lunch. The Hotel is still unchanged since those times.
I later tried to read The naked lunch but I couldn't make it.
I lost this guidebook in Fes, on my fourth trip to Morocco in september 2008.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

very, very thorough. Good information on travel within Morocco (city to city) and covers so much of the country that you could stay there for a year and keep using the book.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good, maybe a little better than the Lonely Planet guides I've looked through.