Eugene Fodor; Author of Tourist Guidebooks

Eugene Fodor, the Hungarian-born travel guru whose guidebooks gave tourists insight into both the sights and the sense of 170 lands around the world, has died.

Fodor was 85 when he died of a brain tumor Monday at a hospital in Torrington, Conn.

Robert Fisher, a business associate and publisher of Fisher’s Travel Guides, said his longtime friend had lived in nearby Litchfield for the past 26 years.

A pioneer in travel guides when few existed, Fodor visited more than 130 of the countries of which his firm wrote. The first guide, in 1936, was “On the Continent.”

The 1,212-page comprehensive guide revolutionized the industry with segments written by major playwrights and journalists familiar with both the highways and folkways of Europe.

Expanded to include Britain, it became “Europe 1938” when it was published in the United States.

That volume became the signature of Fodor’s future efforts, providing visitors with a love of travel that he said should not be exclusive to “the sights” of a land but of meeting “peoples whose customs, habits and general outlook are different from your own.”

The books, which now sell about 200 million copies a year, still are noted for detailed and entertaining descriptions of places and people.

Videotapes now augment the original pictorial guides to places such as Bangkok, Great Britain, Hawaii, Mexico, Singapore and Hungary, where Fodor was born Jenoe Fodor in Leva.

As a young man, he toured Europe and attended college in France.

“I wanted to see the world and I didn’t have the wherewithal,” he once said. “So I wrote all the shipping lines in those days and offered my services as an interpreter and got a job with the French line.”

That led to work as a travel writer, and eventually to the travel books.

After his 1938 guide to Europe became a success, he came to the United States at about the time Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. He remained here, becoming an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army. By then he could speak and write in six languages and said he was “adequate” in four others.

Out of that came an accusation from E. Howard Hunt in the 1970s that Fodor had been an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. Hunt was the former CIA spy linked to the Watergate scandal.

Fodor denied personal involvement with the CIA but refused to comment on whether his travel guides provided cover for U.S. intelligence operatives abroad who were acting as writers.

At the end of World War II, Fodor returned to Europe, which he used as a base while often spending 10 months a year on the road.

As Eastern countries began to seek Western currency, his list of titles grew rapidly. At one point, Albania was the only country not the subject of at least one chapter.

“I had a chapter, but they protested against it,” he told the Reuters news agency in 1988.

In 1986, Fodor’s Travel Guides were sold to Random House, but Fodor had reduced his role in the firm years earlier.