Vertebrate Publishing: 117 books
No Place to Fall
Superalpinism in the High Himalaya
Language: English
Release Date: March 14, 2013
No Place to Fall is Victor Saunder's follow up to his Boardman Tasker Prize winning debut book Elusive Summits. Covering three expeditions to familiar and unfamiliar ranges in Nepal, the Karakoram and the Kumaon, each shares the exhilaration of attempting new alpine-style routes on terrifyingly committing...
Elusive Summits
Four expeditions in the Karakoram
Language: English
Release Date: March 14, 2013
Elusive Summits is the award winning first book by British mountaineer Victor Saunders, winner of the 1990 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. Documenting climbs in the 1980s, at a time when the greatest mountains in the greatest ranges had been climbed by numerous routes, collected like...
by Joe Tasker
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2013
I could never again maintain that I was caught up in this game unwillingly. I knew now what I wanted to do. Willingly would I accept the hardship and fear, the discipline and the sacrifices, if only I could be given back the chance to climb that mountain.' Joe Tasker lies, struck down by a tooth abscess,...
Cold Wars
Climbing the fine line between risk and reality
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2011
I was aware that I was cold - beyond cold. I was a lump of meat left for too long in a freezer, a body trapped beneath the ice, sinking down into the dark. 'I was freezing to death.' In this brilliant sequel to his award-winning debut "Psychovertical", mountaineering stand-up Andy Kirkpatrick...
Mountains of Tartary
Mountaineering and exploration in northern and central Asia in the 1950s
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2015
In Undiscovered Scotland climbing and mountaineer W.H. Murray transports the reader to the wilds of Scotland, exploring the hills and climbing on ice, rock and snow. Murray, a former prisoner of war, is relishing his freedom – all the sweeter following his captivity – and we follow him on his...
Two Mountains and a River
I made a resolve not to begin climbing until assured by a plague of flies that summer had really come
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2016
H.W. Tilman’s Two Mountains and a River picks up where Mount Everest 1938 left off. In this instalment of adventures, Tilman and two Swiss mountaineers set off for the Gilgit region of the Himalaya with the formidable objective of an attempt on the giant Rakaposhi (25,550 feet). However, this project...
Mischief in Patagonia
An intolerable deal of sea, one halfpennyworth of mountain
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2015
'So I began thinking again of those two white blanks on the map, of penguins and humming birds, of the pampas and of gauchos, in short, of Patagonia, a place where, one was told, the natives’ heads steam when they eat marmalade.'
So responded H. W. ‘Bill’ Tilman to his own realisation...
The Magician's Glass
Character and fate: eight essays on climbing and the mountain life
Language: English
Release Date: July 31, 2017
‘How much risk is worth taking for so beautiful a prize?’
The Magician’s Glass by award-winning writer Ed Douglas is a collection of eight recent essays on some of the biggest stories and best-known personalities in the world of climbing.
In the title essay, he writes about failure...
Summits and Secrets
The Kurt Diemberger autobiography
Language: English
Release Date: March 8, 2019
‘A book grows rather like a snow crystal. One doesn’t write it from start to finish but, in greater or less degree, all at the same time … that is why my book is not in chronological order; for everything is of the present, held in the moment when thought captures it.’
Kurt Diemberger’s...
Spirits of the Air
Part of the Kurt Diemberger Omnibus
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 2015
Kurt Diemberger belongs to an elite mountaineering club. He is one of only two climbers to have made first ascents of two 8,000-metre peaks - Broad Peak and Dhaulagiri. His Broad Peak ascent was the first eight-thousander climbed in alpine style without oxygen. He had climbed the major Alps north...
Over the Hills and Far Away
A life in the mountains: From Snowdonia to the Himalaya
Language: English
Release Date: November 27, 2017
‘The whole trail has been orchestrated to make it possible for each one of us, in different ways, to be “touched” by wilderness’
Over the Hills and Far Away is a collection of essays that demonstrates Rob Collister’s thirty-year experience in mountaineering. From solo climbing in...
In Some Lost Place
The first ascent of Nanga Parbats Mazeno Ridge
Language: English
Release Date: July 8, 2015
In the summer of 2012, a team of six climbers set out to attempt the first ascent of one of the great unclimbed lines of the Himalaya - the giant Mazeno Ridge on Nanga Parbat, the world's ninth highest mountain. At ten kilometres in length, the Mazeno is the longest route to the summit of an 8,000-metre...
Echoes
One climber's hard road to freedom
Language: English
Release Date: August 21, 2012
"As I sat cradling the man's head, with his blood and brains sticking to my hands, I heard a voice - my own voice. It was asking me something. Asking how I had ended up like this, desperate and lost among people who thought nothing of caving in a man's head and then standing back to watch him...
Ice with Everything
In climbing mountains or sailing the seas one often has to settle for less than one hoped.
Language: English
Release Date: April 6, 2017
‘For most men, as Epicurus has remarked, rest is stagnation and activity madness. Mad or not, the activity that I have been pursuing for the last twenty years takes the form of voyages to remote, mountainous regions.’
H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman’s fourteenth book describes three more of those...