Climbing Mount Everest, The Bibliography: The Literature and History of Climbing the World's Highest Mountain

Publication Year: 1994.

Climbing Mount Everest, The Bibliography: The Literature and History of Climbing the World’s Highest Mountain. Compiled by Audrey Salkeld and John Boyle. Sixways Publishing, Clevedon BS21 7SL, England, 1993. 120 pages, soft cover. $20.

As a leading historian of Himalayan mountaineering, Audrey Salkeld needs little introduction. Over many years, hundreds of authors, journalists and film makers have relied on her expert knowledge to research or verify climbing episodes, dates, the backgrounds of climbers, both celebrities and unsung, along with hard-to-find expedition minutiae.

In this pocket-sized volume, she and John Boyle, with his enormous Everest library, have put together an exhaustive compendium of all known Everest attempts. It includes flights over or off the mountain, walks around it, as well as the illicit climbs of which few records exist.

The book is divided into three parts: a bibliography of Everest books, a chronology of expeditions and a listing by author of articles in the major climbing journals. It is unique in that it supplies an invaluable connection of expedition chronology to its extensive bibliography. Where would you go to learn more about, say, the Polish winter ascent of 1980? Here it is fully referenced with six books and eight journal articles.

Climbing Mount Everest will quickly become the invaluable guide to anyone interested in finding the primary sources within the vast Everest literature.

Thomas M. Holzel