Eland Books is a small, independent publishing house established by John Hatt, a former travel editor at Harpers & Queen magazine, in London in 1982 with the aim of republishing and reviving classic travel books that have fallen out of print over time.
Its list, which includes authors such as Norman Lewis and Dervla Murphy, currently runs to about a hundred or so titles and is highly regarded by critics and book reviewers.
Eland is today run by former travel guidebook authors Barnaby Rogerson and his wife Rose Baring. Although its list has diversified into biography and fiction, the majority of the titles remain tales of travel, such as Norman Lewis's A Dragon Apparent and Naples '44.
In 2016, Rogerson explained that Eland's mission as a publisher is: "… to celebrate the diversity of the world, offering up 'anthropology-lite' under the blanket cover of preserving the best travel writing as well as to preserve the stories about past societies that have been destroyed by the modern world – precious little building blocks of other ways in which to live, from which a better world may one day be constructed by our heirs."