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- Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Here is a list. It contains 100 climbing and mountaineering books. Some are brilliant; some are not. Some have won awards; some of them should have. Some of them are only a year or two old; some were written over 100 years ago. One of these books might make your top five; one of them might be the worst climbing book you've ever read – if you even finished it. Most of the big names are here – Harrer, Simpson, McDonald, Roberts, Krakauer, Bonatti, Kirkpatrick, Moffat (and Moffatt) – and some not-so-big names. Have a read, see what you think. And remember: it's just a list.
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Contents
Jack Roberts on the Ruth Glacier, 1978. © Simon McCartney.
Introduction
Here is a list.
It contains 100 climbing and mountaineering books – something for you to idly think about while you’re lashed to a belay stance. You might be thinking that it’s a list of the greatest mountaineering books of all time ranked from 100 to one. It certainly isn’t. Just as the pitch stretching ahead of you isn’t the best climb in the world, or the hardest or the easiest. It’s just a climb, and similarly here are some good books. You should read a few of them. Once you’ve reached the top of the climb, that is.
I would like to tell you that I’ve read them all. I haven’t. I wish I could tell you I agree with the order. I don’t. And I would like to tell you that my favourite five books of all time are on the list. Three of them aren’t.
But it is a list, and as a genre of predominantly non-fiction, there are a few shockingly brilliant, possibly far-fetched books buried inside it.
The Methodology
The simple aim was to generate a list of the world’s favourite mountaineering books. The basic rationale was this: if a book received a ‘mention’ then that equalled a ‘vote’. No one mention was weighted above another – the book with the most votes got first, and so on. The following mention-gathering criteria was employed.
A competition win equalled one vote; shortlisting and special mentions also qualified for one vote. If a book was adapted into a movie – one vote. If a book received more than twenty 5-star reviews on amazon.com, one vote; and amazon.co.uk, also one vote. If a book made someone else’s list, if it appeared on Goodreads, if it made the top fifty title searches on Google, and so on – all accounted for another vote.
Then, to start refining the list, I asked scores of climbers – as international as my address book would allow – to name their top five books. The only mentions not counted were where an author or publisher mentioned their own book; the only exception being me, as I had The Endless Knot in my top five which, technically speaking, 6is published by Vertebrate, but then it didn’t get enough votes elsewhere so didn’t make the cut anyway.
Where votes were tied, I went back to the internet to see what the book’s footprint was in order to separate out one text from another.
Three points will be obvious to the statisticians out there. Firstly, the sampling is biased due to the influence of any regional algorithms at work in my web browsers, though I did use different browsers and search engines. Secondly, the results are predominantly in the English language (thanks Silvo Karo for your input) and ultimately my own bias was at play; books I know and recognise would jump out at me from obscure places and therefore get a few more votes. Thirdly, and sadly, the results favour older titles from a very early point – they just have more traction in the market. This means that books like Kelly Cordes’s book The Tower, every bit as good as many in the top twenty, don’t have the weight of time behind them. Similarly, The White Spider, which is at best an okay read, was everybody’s favourite, despite few people really remembering why.
Basically, the list is just that: a list.
As Voytek Kurtyka pointedly told me:
‘I can’t switch my mind into musing about climbing books, especially as they didn’t influence my brain so much. Certainly much less than the mainstream literature or the climbing itself or the music or just nature. By the way, do you know that it is a sin to put the arts on the ranking list?’
Female Writers and Protagonists
Amazon’s top 100 mountaineering titles typically contains ninety-eight books by male writers. Of the two not written by men, one is Nan Shepherd’s excellent The Living Mountain, while the other is a biography about a man written by Bernadette McDonald. Times they are a-changing, and with the publication of the anthology Waymaking – lots of votes but sadly ineligible – more female voices in the mountaineering genre are emerging. Give it five years and weigh the index based on modern publications and we will see a lot more female writers. 7
For the time being, enjoy the excellent works of McDonald, Mort, Shepherd, Moffat et al., because, after all – despite what Amazon says and against the tide of the sheer number of books published in the genre by men – a good few books by women made the cut, although sadly only one landed a spot in the top twenty-five.
Modern Classics
With publishing houses like Vertebrate Publishing, Mountaineers Books, Rocky Mountain Books, Les Éditions du Mont-Blanc, Guérin, Desnivel and Alpine Studio regularly publishing brilliant new mountain literature I would expect the top 100 to look very different if it had some sort of sales figures adjustment to analyse what people are buying and reading in the current market. Indeed, for any book published in the last ten years to make the top 100 is truly remarkable – and many others deserved to make the list. Talking to these publishers directly, some of their current top titles are:
Mountaineers BooksRising, Sharon Woods; My Old Man and the Mountain, Leif Whittaker; The Sharp End of Life, Dierdre Wolownick.
Rocky Mountain BooksLord of the Abyss, Paul Preuss; Honouring High Places, Junko Tabei and Helen Y. Rolfe; Where the Clouds Can Go, Conrad Kain.
Les Éditions du Mont-BlancMuztagh Ata: le père des glaciers (Muztagh Ata: the Father of Glaciers), Françoise Cadoux; Nous étions immortels (We Were Immortal), Maurizio Zanolla; The 9th Grade, David Chambre.
GuérinJe vous écris de là-haut (I Write to You from Up There), Jean-Christophe Lafaille; Double Espresso, Cédric Sapin-Defour; Raide Vivant (Stiff Living), Paul Bonhomme.
DesnivelBájame una estrella, Miriam García Pascual; Cita con la cumbre, Juanjo San Sebastián; Andando la vida, Pati Blasco.
Alpine StudioCento anni in vetta, Daniele Redaelli; Una vita tra le montagne, Goretta Traverso; La torre del vento, Casimiro Ferrari. 8
The Greatest Writers
Authors with multiple entries include:
Peter Boardman
Walter Bonatti
Nick Bullock
Heinrich Harrer
Andy Kirkpatrick
Jon Krakauer
Bernadette McDonald
Reinhold Messner
Jim Perrin
Paul Pritchard
David Roberts
Eric Shipton
Joe Simpson
Joe Tasker
H.W. Tilman
Stephen Venables
Tourists
Halfway down the Ogre, while stormbound with broken ribs and pneumonia, Chris Bonington dryly said to what was left of Doug Scott, ‘We’re going to make a fortune out of this’. Doug asked him how, and in a fit of coughing, Chris said, ‘The Book! – The Book!’
While it is typical for a mountaineer to have an adventure – possibly one where not everybody has the good fortune to return – and for the events to be scribbled down and sent to the publisher while fresh, it is also not unusual for great writers to pay our humble genre a visit and have a crack at a book. Macfarlane, Newby, Barker and Bowley; their books are all engaging, but they are not real climbers like you and me.
Authors without a full complement of toes almost got a sympathy vote. 9
The Collector’s Choice
Collectors of mountaineering literature will buy any old yarn. They love one stormbound mountain epic as much as another, so they have an entirely different set of criteria by which they rank their 100 favourite books. I asked book collector Chris Harle what he looks for in a mountaineering book:
Scarcity: regardless of a book’s age, scarcity drives the obsessive hunt for the ‘holy grail’ of mountain literature in second-hand bookshops, charity shops, book dealer websites and catalogues, auctions, eBay, and so on.
Condition is everything: you are always looking for a book that is in better condition than the one you already have.
Dust jackets: in some cases – particularly with books published before the Second World War – the dust jacket can account for fifty per cent of a book’s value. This is due to the economic standards prevalent at the time when paper was generally of poor quality and dust jackets rarely survived undamaged.
First editions: as a general rule, first editions (first impression/printing) are more desirable.
Signatures: collectors tend to prefer author signatures written on the title page without any dedication or inscription to the book owner. Obviously, signatures of deceased authors on older books attract more value. It could be argued that certain modern books are scarcer unsigned!
Provenance: being able to trace the history of the book ownership adds interest – particularly if it belonged to a famous person or if they featured in the book.
‘And so from the hills we return refreshed in body, in mind and in spirit, to grapple anew with life’s problems. For a while we have lived simply, wisely and happily; we have made good friends; we have adventured well.’ – F.S. SMYTHE, The Mountain Top 10
Noel Dwyer is another book collector. He had this to say:
Mountaineering books are beautiful. They are about heroes. They describe the best of times and the very worst. They tell of the power of determination and of mountaineers who are never content. There is always a harder climb. These texts are valuable historical records of what it was like to be first to stand where no one has ever stood before. These books portray the beauty and the anger of nature. Turn the page and travel to the ends of the Earth. Read of times often nearly forgotten. Read of the glory and share the tears of loss. There will always be adventure for there will always be men and women for whom life is not life without challenges. Their stories will always be told and greatly appreciated and admired. Mountaineering books captivate and inspire. Read the word. Marvel at the photograph. Observe an added comment or a folded edge, a sign of a frustrating interruption. How amazing that these books, so small, can hold the world.
The Greatest Prize
The world’s two most established prizes for the climbing and mountaineering genre are the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountaineering Literature and the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Festival. Winning both is tricky. Jerry Moffatt and Niall Grimes’s Revelations and John Porter’s One Day as a Tiger both won the Grand Prize at Banff, only to stumble against harsh judging in the Boardman Tasker Award. Whereas Simon McCartney’s The Bond easily scooped the Boardman Tasker and won the Mountain Literature Award in Banff (a rare double), but not the Grand Prize. Only three authors and three books have done this double: Bernadette McDonald with Freedom Climbers, Paul Pritchard with The Totem Pole and Roger Hubank with Hazard’sWay. 11
The Future of Mountaineering Writing
Everest books have always sold and always will. Even Vertebrate, which famously declared it wouldn’t publish an Everest book, has somehow ended up with about a dozen of them – thankfully not all of them making the top 100. In the future, I think the good books will get better, and the bad books will get worse. It’s no longer good enough to scribble down your epic, stick a cover photo on it, call it ‘White Hell’ and publish it. Today books need to compete with social media, with a thousand TV channels, YouTube and still their traditional enemy – the outdoors.
In recent years, the better publishing houses have been putting more and more thought into their mountain books; we’ve seen lovely designs, high production values, and interesting, new stories. Conversely, as a generation of baby-boomer mountaineers fade from view there has been a clamour to get it all down on paper and, encouraged by a rampant self-publishing industry, all sorts of tat has made it on to the pages of Amazon. Everybody has a book inside them, but in most cases that is exactly where it should stay.
What’s In and What’s Not
I’ve compiled a list of mountaineering narratives. Fundamentally each book is about climbing. What aren’t included are anthologies, because I would insist on The Games Climbers Play winning.
Books primarily concerned with sitting on a coffee table haven’t been included either – large format, heavily illustrated, indulgent books simply fill up the bookcase too quickly. Guidebooks – how-to and where-to – books are also excluded. Shit books didn’t make the cut. Fiction was included, because after all who knows what’s true and what isn’t in some of our classic titles? It is enough effort working out who wrote some of them without questioning their truth. Ice as we know gets steeper over time, and handholds smaller. 12
Who Didn’t Make the List?
Premier de cordée, Roger Frison-Roche’s classic of French literature – better known in the English language as First on the Rope – is perhaps the greatest piece of climbing fiction ever written, and although now republished it had been long out of print during the list’s research stage. Nick Williams’ unsung gem Jagged Red Line got a handful of votes but not as many as it should, nor did Doug Scott’s autobiography Up and About. Tony Howard’s delightful account of his ascent of the Troll Wall and Trevor Braham’s classic When the Alps Cast Their Spell also failed to make it. Reinhold Messner received a lot of votes for a lot of books, but his voting was spread widely so many of them didn’t make the cut, and a few modern books very nearly made it, such as Alex Honnold’s Alone on the Wall.
Have Your Say
Of course, you might not agree with some of the books in the list – I’d be very surprised if everyone did! So why not let me know what your top five mountaineering books are. Send me a message on Twitter (@VertebratePub) or email [email protected] and let’s keep the conversation going.
