When Arthur Frommers published Europe on Five Dollars a Day in 1957, he started a global travel and tourism revolution, making mass tourism affordable.
Sixty years later, the Arthur Frommer publisher published more than 350 guidebooks and sold 75 million copies.
His daughter, Pauline Frommer already wrote 130 books and co-hosted her syndicated radio: “The Travel Show.”
Arthur Frommer was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, on July 17, 1929. He died this week on November 18, at the age of 95.
His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria. They lived in Jefferson City, Missouri, before moving to New York City when he was 14. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and worked as an office boy at Newsweek.
Arthur earned a political science degree from New York University. At Yale Law School, from which he graduated in 1953, he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
He wrote his first manual, 1955’s “The G.I.’s Guide to Travelling in Europe,” while serving in Berlin in a U.S. Army intelligence unit. After returning to New York, he joined the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the first “white-shoe” firms to hire both Jews and Gentiles.
For many years, Frommers’ guidebooks made up close to 25% of all travel guides sold in the United States.
In 1977, he sold the brand to Simon & Schuster; in 2013, he repurchased it from Google, which had acquired it the year before.
In the 2004 raunchy teen comedy “EuroTrip,” an actor playing Frommer meets a group of young travelers who had been using a Frommer guide throughout the movie and offers a job to the book’s fiercest devotee. For years, moviegoers thought the British character was Frommer himself. Frommer was offered the cameo but turned it down because of scheduling demands.
In 2011, he traveled to his mother’s birthplace of Lomza, Poland, where he located his grandfather’s tombstone and learned more about the vibrant Jewish life there before the Holocaust.
“My whole life, I had heard stories about how horrific Poland was and how happy my relatives were to leave it,” he said. “Being there, you saw the other side. They had vibrant communities, gorgeous temples, and fertile countryside. For the first time, I realized they had lost something by leaving.”
He divorced Hope Arthur and is survived by his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld, his daughter Pauline, stepdaughters Tracie Holder and Jill Holder, and four grandchildren.
His daughter Pauline posted on frommers.com :
It is with deep sadness that I announce my father, Arthur Frommer, founder of Frommer’s guidebooks and Frommers.com, passed away today at the age of 95, at home and surrounded by loved ones.
Throughout his remarkable life, Arthur Frommer democratized travel, showing average Americans how anyone can afford to travel widely and better understand the world. He published the revolutionary Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, the first in Frommer’s guidebook series that continues to be published today.
He was a prolific writer, TV and radio host, and speaker. In 1997, he was the founding editor of Frommers.com, one of the world’s first digital travel information sites.
