December 2021: Mountains

Mountains piqued the interest of the group as the topic for the December 2021 meeting.  The group surveyed mountains in works of fiction and nonfiction.  The titles presented included memoirs of record-setting expeditions and life-changing encounters, beautifully illustrated books, and award-winning fiction.

Nonfiction

Seven Years in Tibet

Harrer, Heinrich.  Seven Years in Tibet.  Translated by Richard Graves.  New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1954.  314 pages, with 40 pages of photographs.  First edition.  Heinrich Harrer was a noted Austrian mountain climber.  He and a friend took nearly two years to walk from India through rugged Himalayan passes to the Forbidden City of Lhasa, the home of the Dalai Lama.  Once there, Heinrich met the then-11-year-old 14th Dalai Lama.  Harrer became a confidant to the youthful Dalai Lama and tutored him about the world outside Lhasa.  Harrer and the Dalai Lama remained friends until Harrer's death in 2006.

Pictorial title page

High Adventure

Hillary, Edmund.  High Adventure.  Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 2003.  245 pages.  Illustrated by George Djurkovic.  Bound in full leather.  Signed by the author on a Collector's Edition signature page.  High Adventure was first published in 1955 by Hodder & Stoughton, and the Easton Press signed collector's edition was released in 2003 on the 50th anniversary of Hillary's Mount Everest climb.

Signed limitation page

In 1953, the ninth British expedition of Everest was led by John Hunt.  Hunt planned three assaults of two climbers each once they reached Camp VII at an elevation of 24,000 feet.  The first team set out for the summit on May 26th; they made the first ascent and came within 300 vertical feet of the final summit but were forced to turn back after repeated troubles with their supplemental oxygen supply equipment.  The next day Edmund Hillary, an Australian climber, and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepali-Indian Sherpa mountaineer, launched the second assault.  Snow and wind held them partway up for two days, but they reached the summit (elevation 29,028 ft.) at 11:30 am on May 29, 1953.  They spent only about fifteen minutes at the summit, taking photos to document the ascent, before making their way back down.

Frontispiece and title page

An interesting aside: Hillary's son, Peter, joined Norgay's son, Jamling, in climbing Everest in 2003 on the 50th anniversary of their fathers' famous climb.

Moments of Being

Greene, Raymond.  Moments of Being: The Random Recollections of Raymond Greene.  London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1974.  196 pages with 8 pages of photographs.  This copy is inscribed by the author to a fellow mountaineer: "For Ernest from Raymond because of many memorable moments of being in the High Alps long ago."  There are marginal notes in the text by the recipient.  When Greene writes about spending three weeks in Switzerland climbing with the Oxford Mountaineering Club, Ernest pencils in the margin, "I was there."

Author's inscription and recipient's marginal note

Greene was a physician and avid mountaineer; his memoir extensively covers the intersection of these two aspects of his life.  He completed medical school in 1927 and in 1931 was invited to join Frank Smythe's British expedition of Kamet.  Their successful climb to Kamet's summit was, at the time, the highest mountain ever to have been climbed (elevation 25,446 ft.).  Greene's medical skills were required several times on that climb.  Two years later in 1933, Greene served as a climber and chief medical officer for the fourth British expedition of Mount Everest, led by Hugh Ruttledge.  While the expedition did not make the summit, it achieved the highest elevation of Everest (28,200 ft.) until Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary's summit ascent in 1953.  Greene covered the 1953 summit and made the announcement for BBC Radio. 

Beyond his two record-breaking climbs, Raymond Greene made other contributions to mountaineering.  He engineered an experimental smaller, lighter-weight device for carrying supplementary oxygen at high altitude; and, during the Everest climb, he successfully conducted field research on alveolar air, taking breath samples at varying altitudes to later analyze and determine the effects of altitude on alveolar gas (the mixture of oxygen, water vapor, and carbon dioxide expired by the lungs).  He became a leading expert on physiology and the effects of high altitude and cold on the human body.  During World War II, he used his expertise as a physician and mountaineer to advise Allied forces' mountain troops and special operations.  For his contributions to the mountain troops during the war, Greene was awarded the Legion of Honor in France; the rank of Chevalier was bestowed to Greene by President Charles de Gaulle.

Fiction

The Hobbit

Tolkien, J. R. R.  The Hobbit.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997.  289 pages.  Illustrated by Alan Lee.  The Hobbit, or There and Back Again was first published in the UK by George Allen & Unwin in 1937 and in the US by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1938.  The Hobbit tells the story of Bilbo Baggins’s journey, along with Gandalf the wizard and 13 dwarves, to the Misty Mountains on an unexpected adventure.  This copy is signed by the illustrator, Alan Lee.

Drakulya

Doherty, P. C.  Drakulya.  Suffolk: Post Mortem Books, 1997.  365 pages.  Limited edition.  Drakulya was originally published as two titles in 1986, The Prince Drakulya and The Lord Count Drakulya; this edition combines those two titles as the author originally intended.  The binding mimics the original binding and color of the first edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Drakulya is a novel about the historical figure Vlad Drakulya, or Vlad the Impaler.  The first book culminates in Vlad's invasion alongside the Turks of Wallachia, his homeland.  Wallachia is a historical and geographical region of Romania, which includes the Southern Carpathians mountain range, also known as the Transylvanian Alps.  It is here that Vlad Drakulya retakes the throne of his father, Vlad Dracul, prince of Wallachia.

Signed limitation page

This copy is from a limited edition run of 350 copies of which this is copy 252, and is signed by the author on the limitation page.  

Boots and the Glass Mountain

Martin, Claire.  Boots and the Glass Mountain.  New York: Dial Press, 1992.  320 pages.  Illustrated by Gennady Spirin.  In this retelling of a Norwegian folk tale—with parallels to the Cinderella fairy tale—Boots, the youngest of three sons always tasked with the dirtiest chores, must protect his father's field from the trolls' wild stallions.  Boots steadily tames the magical horses, then uses one to ride up a glass mountain—a supposedly impossible feat—to fetch the king's daughter and win her hand.

Sample illustration

The tale is elegantly illustrated by Gennady Spirin, a Russian painter and children's book illustrator noted for his delicate watercolor illustrations reminiscent of the great masters of the Renaissance.  Spirin immigrated to the United States in 1992, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  He has won multiple awards for his illustrations including four gold medals from the Society of Illustrators.  He has also appeared on The New York Times Best Illustrated Books of the Year list four times.  Spirin may be most recognized for his illustration of Julie Andrews's Simeon's Gift (2003) and Madonna's Yakov and the Seven Thieves (2004).

Brokeback Mountain
First UK edition (left) and first US edition (right)

Proulx, Annie.  Brokeback Mountain.  London: Fourth Estate, 1998.  58 pages.  First separate appearance in book form.  Softcover edition with French flaps.

Proulx, Annie.  Brokeback Mountain.  New York: Scribner, 2005.  55 pages.  First American separate appearance.  Softcover edition.

"Brokeback Mountain" first appeared in the October 13, 1997, issue of The New Yorker.  The magazine inadvertently omitted the two-paragraph prologue which opens the short story; subsequent publications were often described as revised or expanded when, in fact, they were simply complete.  The story first appeared in book form in 1998 as a stand-alone story published in the United Kingdom by Fourth Estate.  It was next published in the United States in Proulx's 1999 short story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories.  Its first appearance as a separate book in the United States came in 2005, the same year the film adaptation was released.  Also in 2005, an edition was published containing the short story, the screenplay, and three essays by Proulx and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana.

Order of publication (left to right)

"Brokeback Mountain" won the 1998 National Magazine Award for Fiction and took third place for the 1998 O. Henry Award for short stories of exceptional merit.

Cold Mountain

Frazier, Charles.  Cold Mountain.  New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.  356 pages.  Drawing comparisons to Homer's Odyssey, Cold Mountain follows a wounded deserter from the Confederate army, W. P. Inman, who walks for months to return to his rural mountain community home near Cold Mountain, North Carolina, in search of the love of his life.  Frazier's novel won the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction.  This copy is signed by the author.

Gods of Howl Mountain

Brown, Taylor.  Gods of Howl Mountain.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.  294 pages.  Advance uncorrected proof.

Brown, Taylor.  Gods of Howl Mountain.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.  294 pages.  First edition.

Set in the North Carolina high country in the 1950s, Gods of Howl Mountain follows Rory, a bootleg whiskey runner, and "Granny Mae," his folk healer grandmother.  When Rory's life is in danger Granny Mae, who knows many of the secrets of the mill town at the foot of the perilous Howl Mountain, must decide between revealing secrets and protecting her grandson from the past.