The Birth of Alpier

The company doubled its size overnight, and we suddenly started taking on more writers and looking at other big projects. We'd actually moved out of the house into a kind of ramshackle office - but it was beginning to take shape in the 80s as a real business. And I think when we started doing Europe guides, because we were this little publisher at the other end of the world who had started off doing Asia. When we finally did get around to doing Europe, we were big enough by that point that we could really do it well. It just seemed like we couldn't do anything wrong that every book we did, you know, sold. The books were still selling like crazy,