Daniel Houghton

Lonely Planet, the storied travel guidebooks publisher owned by BBC, is about to be sold. And the buyer is a doozy: reclusive Kentucky billionaire Brad Kelley, who spent the 1990s selling discount cigarette brands like USA Gold, Bull Durham, and Malibu, then sold the company for almost $1 billion in 2001, and parlayed that money into becoming the one of the largest land owners and conservationists in United States. The deal is in final stages of negotiation, and …