Annapurna

North Salem, New York: The Adventure Library, 1995 Hard cover, 8vo., in half buckram with gray paper-covered boards illustrated with mountain scenery. First Edition Thus, xvii, 257 pp. Originally published in France, 1952. In English. Containing map endpapers and numerous photographs reproduced from the original book. Condition: Fine. Described as perhaps the best mountaineering book of all time. The obituary of the French climber appearing in the Guardian newspaper (December 14, 2012) describes how Herzog's pioneering ascent of this 8,000 meter mountain in Nepal in 1950 made the man a national hero of France, along with his team. The price was high, however, costing the Author the loss of all of his fingers and toes to frostbite. The current title was dictated from his hospital bed during a long, and agonizing recovery. Lucien Devies explains the mindset of high mountaineering in the book's original Preface : " Climbing is a means of self-expression...Man overcomes himself, affirms himself and realizes himself in the struggle toward the summit, toward the absolute. In the extreme tension of the struggle, on the frontier of death, the universe disappears and drops away beneath us. Space, time, fear, suffering, no longer exist. Everything then becomes quite simple..." ( p. xi) . First Adventure Library Edition. Hard Cover. Fine.