[Whymper, Edward.] Ian Smith.

First edition. 8vo. Numerous b and w illusts., some colour illusts.; new in original cloth, d.j.

Edward Whymper crowned a meteoric climbing career with the first ascent in 1865 of the last great unclimbed summit in the Alps, the Matterhorn. He then made two expeditions to north west Greenland, and later undertook a remarkably successful trip to Ecuador, where he climbed the country’s highest mountains. In the early 1900s, he was invited by the Canadian Pacific Railway to visit and explore the Canadian Rockies - Mount Whymper in the Vermillion Pass area is named after his first ascent of that peak. Whymper himself described some of his experiences in books such as Scrambles amongst the Alps and Travels amongst the Great Andes of the Equator, but not since Frank Smythe’s Edward Whymper (1940) has there been a full biography of the man. Ian Smith, who previously edited Whymper’s London Diary for the London Record Society in 2008, has now written an excellent account of Whymper’s life and climbing achievements. Based on Whymper’s diaries and notebooks, Shadow of the Matterhorn also uses new material from archives around the world to give a fuller picture of this artisan from London, and reproduces many of Whymper’s engravings and previously unpublished photographs.