Eric Shipton: The Six Mountain Travel Books. Diadem Books, London & The Mountaineers, Seattle, 1985. 800 pages. $30.00.

This is the age of re-runs, revivals, retreads of old classics. On Broadway, in the White House and the air waves, nostalgia’s sad sweet song supplies a charm that the present lacks. So it is in mountaineering. The further the sport “progresses” to the radical and the death-haunted, the more golden does the past appear. Standing somewhere between the archaic past and the present are the towering figures of Eric Shipton and H.W. Tilman. They knew risk all right, but not how to place a piton.

These six of Shipton’s typically short books have been collected into one fat, if not particularly well-constructed volume: Nanda Devi, Blank on the Map, Upon that Mountain, Mountains of Tartary, The Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition 1951, Land of Tempest. There are a few titbits in the appendix: Shipton’s obituary, his mountaineering record, a selected bibliography, an account of the 1935 Everest reconnaissance and the 1939 explorations in the Karakoram.

Finally, there’s Jim Perrin’s introduction, which gives us a foretaste of the full length biography that he’s currently working on. Perrin has patiently dogged a very difficult subject and on the always fascinating issue of the leadership of the 1953 Everest Expedition he has done some original research on a “bizarre tale of fudging and mudging, falsification of official minutes, unauthorized invitations, and opportunistic and desperate last-minute seizures of initiative by a particular faction.”

Those who own some but not all these volumes will know what they’re getting in for. For younger climbers first coming upon these works, there will be delight and astonishment surely. But there will be something else—the suspicion that looking backwards in mountaineering is a lot more wonderful than looking forward. Shipton himself was generous with his praise of the post-war hard men. But it was all too clear that he never wished to be like them, and he considered himself lucky in his historical timing. We, looking backwards, are fortunate to have such a fine and wise witness to that precious era in mountaineering that is equivalent to Elizabethan theatre or French post-impressionism or heavyweight boxing of the Thirties and Forties.

John Thackray