Adventure Publications
Adventure Publications is renowned for its nature-themed products. Perhaps best known for its field guides to birds, mammals, trees, wildflowers, rocks, fish, and other topics of interest, the publishing imprint also specializes in travel guides, regional histories, cookbooks, children’s books, and more. Adventure Publications features a unique product line—including books, playing cards, journals, and pocket guides—built around astonishingly beautiful photography and informative yet accessible text. These products are sold everywhere from gift shops in national parks and museums to traditional bookstores.
The secret to Adventure’s success lies within its unique and charming history. In 1988, the company was owned by a small group called Nordell Graphics in Staples, Minnesota. Gordon Slabaugh, a commission sales representative for book publishers since the late 1960s, took a special interest in a few of Adventure’s Scandinavian titles. He and his wife, Gerri, purchased the name, logo, and about a dozen titles from Nordell.
The operation moved to the Slabaughs’ garage outside Cambridge, Minnesota. There, Gordon began billing and shipping inventory, after his regular workday. The company grew so much in two years that Gerri, a former special education administrator for a three-county area, joined the company full-time in 1990, becoming essential to the management of the business.
Gordon’s approach to publishing was based on his extensive sales experience: simply stated, “I know what I can sell.” Gordon was a champion of small accounts, and he cultivated them as carefully as he did major accounts. He also loved to pursue alternative markets for books. Adventure began attending the Upper Midwest Gift Association Show, while other publishers only attended book trade shows. This created a diversified account base, which remains an important strategy for the company to this day.
That strategy yielded immediate results, and the Slabaughs saw their company grow almost too quickly to manage. More books meant a need for more staff, and both required the Slabaughs to find more room. The business moved to a pole shed. When that filled up, a new addition was built. After that, a semi trailer was brought onsite to serve as a warehouse. When that space wasn’t enough, many books were moved to offsite storage facilities and even to employees’ homes.
Business at the Slabaughs’ was anything but ordinary. Staff members dealt with everything from acorns falling into customers’ boxes and a roaming emu that stole people’s belongings to fighting a backwoods fire—not to mention the daily ordeal of carting books up a hill to get them loaded onto the shipping trucks.
In 1998, Adventure vaulted into the bird-watching market with its first field guide: Birds of Minnesota. The top-selling book went into multiple reprints within a couple of years. This success was repeated with Birds of Wisconsin, Birds of Michigan, and many others. It became readily apparent that the format for these field guides met a market demand. Consumers wanted to
- look up a bird by its color, not by a name they didn’t know
- see full-color photos, not illustrations
- browse through birds found in their state, not pages of birds they’d never see
- learn interesting facts but not the entire natural history of a bird
By 2001, the company’s continued success was apparent. Gordon and Gerri moved Adventure Publications into Cambridge, to a new building designed specifically for the business. Not surprisingly, they outgrew even that space within six years. To maintain enough room for more than 20 employees and hundreds of titles, they added a large warehouse to the back of their building.
In 2015, AdventureKEEN (a dedicated group of 35 employees based around the country) acquired the publishing house from Gordon and Gerri. Most of Adventure’s staff stayed on, happily sharing tales of the imprint’s colorful past. Adventure Publications remains a vibrant resource for readers who are curious about nature’s countless wonders.
Clerisy Press
Clerisy Press is a premier book publisher that specializes in creating books with both a universal appeal and a distinct sense of place. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Clerisy Press aims to produce books that make our authors, our retail partners, and our readers happy, engaged, and eager to return to our line of books, which includes sports, fitness, history, business, ghost hunting, and more.
Menasha Ridge Press
From humble beginnings as a soggy-shoed veteran of a commercial rafting company, Bob Sehlinger transitioned into writing paddling guidebooks for waterways in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. This river-guide passion culminated in the creation of Menasha Ridge Press, which launched from Bob’s house in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1982. Hundreds of thousands of camping trips, millions of hikes, and a bazillion (or some number close to that) remarkable outdoor adventures sprang from the pages of countless guidebooks sold in the intervening years.
Menasha Ridge Press utilizes guidebook authors who are knowledgeable about their regions and passionate about sharing the wonders of outdoor activities with readers of all experience levels. The guidebooks draw on authors’ firsthand knowledge of the trails and routes they write about. Just like our very first editions, the books are still written by expert practitioners with a love of adventure and the great outdoors.
The longevity of Menasha Ridge Press is directly related to our fantastic authors, our appreciation of the outdoors, and our loyal readers. As a regional publisher, we believe that the most meaningful trips are regular forays into our backyards and beyond. Local parks, community gathering spots, protected wildlife areas, and weekend getaways are the experiences we regularly seek as part of an active, healthy lifestyle.
Looking ahead, our dedication to protecting the environment and preserving outdoor spaces for the enjoyment of future generations continues to fuel our commitment to publishing definitive guidebooks that lead our readers happily along the trails.
Nature Study Guild Publishers
Nature Study Guild Publishers has a rich history intertwined with the remarkable life and achievements of May Theilgaard Watts. Born in Chicago in 1893, the same year as the Chicago World’s Fair, Watts emerged as a highly esteemed naturalist and celebrated ecologist. She was one of four daughters of Danish immigrants, and like her sisters, she received a college education, graduating from the University of Chicago with a focus on botany and ecology.
Watts dedicated much of her professional life to the Morton Arboretum, where she served as a naturalist until her retirement in 1961. Beyond her work at the arboretum, she played a pivotal role in proposing what would become a national rails-to-trails program in 1963, contributing to the creation of the Illinois Prairie Path. Watts’ commitment to making nature accessible to all was evident in her passion for teaching and leading community talks, advocating for prairie restoration, and championing the Midwestern landscapes. Alongside figures like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, Watts helped reshape public understanding of the natural world and its conservation.
The Nature Study Guild series traces its origins to the 1930s when Watts created student handouts featuring a dichotomous key concept, which later evolved into pocket guides. In the 1960s, her son Tom Watts transformed these handouts into a business venture, founding Nature Study Guild in Berkeley with his wife. Tom contributed both text and illustrations to several guides, including “Flower Finder” and “Tree Finder,” the latter being the best-selling and first published book in the series, authored by May Watts herself.
After Tom’s death in 1992, his daughter Bridget relocated the business to Rochester, New York, where she continued to operate it until Keen acquired the rights to the line in 2014. The titles, which had been distributed by Wilderness Press for many years, had by then sold over a million copies, helping countless people across the US and Canada connect with nature.
Nature Study Guides cover three regions: the Pacific Coast, the Rockies, and east of the Rockies. These guides are designed for field use and employ dichotomous keys that guide users through a series of questions to identify plants and animals. Naturalists and educators appreciate the guides for their organization, which encourages examining the structure and families of plants rather than relying on color or general similarity.
In summary, Nature Study Guild Publishers has its roots in the pioneering work of May Theilgaard Watts, whose legacy of environmental education and advocacy continues to inspire through the guides she initiated and her family sustained.
Shelter Publications
Shelter has published 40 books since 1970, since publisher Lloyd Kahn borrowed production equipment from the famous Whole Earth Catalog to create Dome Book 1 and Dome Book 2. Those books sold out immediately around the Berkeley, CA area, and Shelter Publications was off and running. These books are groundbreaking surveys of what is possible in DIY buildings and land maintenance. For decades, Shelter’s books have been teaching readers all over the world about building techniques, creative home solutions, and self-sufficiency.
Shelter Publications is also home to Jeff Galloway’s books on Running and Marathon training. Shelter Publications joined AdventureKEEN in January of 2024, and it’s been going strong ever since.
The Unofficial Guide
From the concept up, The Unofficial Guides are different from other guidebooks. Other guides are researched and developed by an individual author or coauthors, usually travel writers. With such guides, one size fits all, and the needs of a specific target market are never truly taken into account. The Unofficial Guides, by way of contrast, cater to a specific psychographic market: those individuals with a “Type A” personality. It is the tastes, preferences, and opinions of our carefully defined target market that dictate the content of the guides. In other words, we start with the needs of our reader, identified through exhaustive research, and build a book that specifically meets those needs.
No other guides do this, nor can they, really, because the scope of the research and processing of data require time, experience, and resources that are beyond the capabilities of a single author or even several coauthors. An entire organization collects and compiles data for The Unofficial Guides, an organization guided by individuals with extensive training and experience in research design, as well as primary data collection and analysis. Unofficial Guide research is known and respected in both the travel industry and academe, having been cited by such diverse media as USA Today, The Orlando Sentinel, New York Times, Dallas Morning News, Travel Weekly, London Observer, Financial Times, Bottom Line, Money, the BBC, the Travel Channel, CNN, Fox News, Operations Research Forum, and statistics text books published by Addison Wesley.
The editor of the IEEE Journal of Transactions on Evolutionary Computation wrote, “The Unofficial Guides research team is a multidisciplinary group consisting, among others, of data collectors, computer scientists, statisticians, and child psychologists. One would expect to find this type of research at universities, government agencies, or large corporations. To see it in a travel series is amazing!”
Finally, the historical success of The Unofficial Guides confirms that, from a sales perspective, targeting Type As is ideal. First, no other guides target them or understand their singular needs. Second, there is at least one Type A adult in every family or group that is planning to travel. Because Type As are extremely assertive, take-charge kinds of people, this person will usually assume responsibility for almost all of the travel planning and research, including decisions concerning the purchase of guidebooks. In short, The Unofficial Guides target the individual who will most likely plan and lead the family vacation.
Wilderness Press
With its first publication more than 50 years ago, Wilderness Press set the precedent for creating detailed guidebooks written by authors who have hiked every mile of trail. Today, Wilderness Press continues to publish and distribute some of the most highly respected outdoors books and maps in the industry.
In 1967, founder Thomas Winnett published the guidebook Sierra North, and then he celebrated with a high-altitude cocktail party. During his next 30 years as publisher, Winnett wrote numerous books on how to backpack and where to hike in the wild areas of the western United States. Over the years, Wilderness Press has expanded our boundaries to cover the majority of the country. We have also partnered with numerous nonprofit organizations to produce high-quality guidebooks and maps.
In 2008, Wilderness was purchased by AdventureKEEN, a multi-brand outdoors, nature, and travel publishing company that employs more than 30 people in Birmingham, Alabama; Cambridge, Minnesota; and Covington, Kentucky.
We continue to set the bar for comprehensive, accurate, and readable outdoors books. We publish and distribute the best books and maps in the industry, from sea kayaking to snowshoeing, from leisurely rambles through the woods to challenging climbs on glacial mountains. Half a century later, our mission remains as essential as it was at the founding: to produce high-quality guidebooks written by experienced practitioners with firsthand knowledge of each step along the trail.