[Herbert, E.S.] Young, Geoffrey Winthrop.

Mountain Craft. With 28 Illustrations.

First edition. London, Methuen & Co. Ltd., no year (c.1920). 15.5 cm x 22.5 cm. Frontispiece, XVII, 603 pages. Hardcover [publisher’s original green cloth] with gilt lettering on spine. Blind title lettering on front board. Deckled fore and tail edges. Very good condition with only minor signs of external wear. Interior bright and clean with occasional foxing. From the library of mountaineer and solicitor E.S.Herbert, with his name to the endpaper.

Includes, for example, the following: J.P Farrar, ‘Equipment for the Alps’ / Sydney Spencer, ‘Mountain Photography’ / Sir W. Martin Conway, ‘Mountaineering in the Artic (Spitsbergen) / George Finch, ‘The Mountains of Corsica’ / T.G. Longstaff, ‘The Himalaya’ / Malcolm Ross, ‘The Southern Alps of New Zealand’ / A. L Mumm, ‘The Rocky Mountains’ etc.

The book, considered a masterwork in its genre contains a dedication to the memory of “Gallant Comrades in the Mountains.” Forty-nine fellow climbers killed during the Great War of 1914-18.

Recommending the book to those even a little more than unsympathetic to the charms of hills and mountains, Young has these words:
″And those who are not climbers, but who are interested in or perhaps even resentful of the fascination which mountains exercise, may discover, if they have the patience, that mountaineering as it is now practised is no simple outlet for the athletic impulse, and no selfish indulgence in a game which has the demerit of risking lives often of notable value; but that it is a genuine craft, as well as a genuine enthusiasm; an education alike in self-development and in self-subordination; a discipline of character, of infinite variety in its demands and in its reactions upon strength, endurance, nerve, will, and temper, upon powers of organization as upon powers of dealing with men; a test of personality for which no preparation may be considered excessive, and science for whose mastery the study of all our active years is barely sufficient. Of its rewards, in health, self-knowledge, aesthetic pleasure, and incomparable adventure, it is not the place to speak in a book of practical counsel.” (p.ix)

Geoffrey Winthrop Young (1876 – 1958) was a renowned British climber, gifted poet and educator, and author of several notable books on mountaineering. In the years prior to the outbreak of the Great War he made several new and technically challenging ascents in the Alps (Wikipedia). Considered by many to be the greatest English mountaineer of his era, Young was a friend and mentor to George Mallory, whom he called “our Sir Galahad.” His climbing and social parties at Pen-y-Pass, in the shadow of Snowdon, Wales began early in the century did much to create a climbing community and included many figures from the Bloomsbury set who would go onto the prominence. Young was instrumental in Mallory’s selection for the Everest expeditions in the 1920s.
A graduate of Cambridge, he was, for a time, a war correspondent for the Daily Chronicle during the Great War. His dispatches, collected in the book ‘From the Trenches’, were among the first and finest eyewitness accounts of the horrors of the Western Front. A pacifist and critic of the war, he be joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit to help care for the wounded in the Ypres salient. (Wade Davis, Into the Silence)
In 1917 Young went to Italy to establish an ambulance service in the mountains of the Italian-Austrian front. On 31st August he was hit by an Austrian shell. His left leg was so badly wounded that it had to be amputated at the knee. After the war he continued to climb, and would summit the Matterhorn with a prosthetic limb after the war.
He was also an advocate for educational reform and worked with the German educator Kurt Hahn. The two men were also involved in the creation of Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme and the Outward Bound movement. Young wrote many books on climbing. He was president of the Alpine Club from 1941 to 1944 and the main figure behind the founding of the British Mountaineering Council during the Second World War. (spartacus-educational)

• Keywords: Alps · British History of Climbing · British History of Exploration · British History of Mountaineering · Camping · climbing · Equipment · Hiking · Hillwalking · Himalaya · Himalayas · Library & Collection Building · Mountaineer’s Mountain · Mountaineering · Mountaineering – Collection · Mountaineers · Mountains · Nature · Nature Photography · New Zealand Alps/Mountains · Outdoors · Pyrenees · Rocky Mountains · Sports
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 120239AB