The Armchair Mountaineer, edited by George Alan and Carol D. Smith. New York: Pitman Publishing Corp., 1968. 361 pages, 20 colored illustrations, 9 cartoons, numerous drawings by Debra Healy. Price: $15.00.

This is a delightful and well-put-together anthology, and one can feel throughout how much the editors enjoyed their task. They have grouped their selections under 13 main headings: Why? Why not?; Mountain History; Mountain Men, and a few Women too; Mountaineering’s Kissing Cousin, Skiing; A Word on how to climb; Flora and Fauna, Mountains of Myth and the Myth of Mountains; Mountains and the Quest of Man; Morals and Manners; Mountains and the Creativity of Man; Peaks and Valleys; Tight Rope; From the Valley and the Plain.

All of us have our favorite tidbits of Alpine literature, and this reader for one was delighted to welcome so many old friends and to find some new and delightful ones. It was good to read so much of Sir Martin Conway, Leslie Stephen and Claire-Eliane Engel, to rediscover the spine-tingling accounts of Geoffrey Young’s ascent of the South Face of the Täschhorn and his later one-legged climb of the Rothorn, Robert Bates’ graphic account of an episode on K2, Maurice Herzog on Annapurna, a lot of the epic of Everest, and Whymper’s classic description of the disaster on the Matterhorn. But, there are things for every Alpine taste here. A. D. Godley’s Switzerland has not been forgotten, and the editors even included Peterli the cat’s climb of the Matterhorn!

Altogether this is a splendid book to browse about in, when one cannot be in high places. It is regrettable in a way that the volume is so heavy, but then it could not have been so well presented in a lighter form. The black and white reproductions and Debra Healy’s drawings are delightful, but alas! the color reproductions are mostly not worthy of this excellent anthology.

Ursula Corning