FROM AN ALPINIST’S LIBRARY
FORBES, James David.
Travels through the Alps ... New edition revised and annotated by W.A.B. Coolidge ... With portrait, new maps, and many illustrations and diagrams.
London, Adam and Charles Black, 1900.
8vo, pp. xxxviii, [2], 572; with portrait frontispiece, 6 folding maps (2 in pocket at end), and numerous topographical sketches and illustrations within text; small abrasion to last page; a very good, uncut and partly unopened copy in publisher’s green cloth, spine and upper cover lettered in gilt, top edge gilt, green endpapers; extremities very slightly worn; inscription ‘Guido Rey 1901’ in red pencil at head of half-title, short pencil note in Italian loosely inserted facing p. 322, a few marginal pencil marks.
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Travels through the Alps ... New edition revised and annotated by W.A.B. Coolidge ... With portrait, new maps, and many illustrations and diagrams.
A handsome edition of four of Forbes’s chief writings relating to his Alpine travels, from the library of Guido Rey (1861–1935), the distinguished Italian Alpinist, writer and photographer.
Physicist, geologist and mountaineer, Forbes (1809–1868) was professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University and published important works on the polarization of heat and on glaciers. ‘His reputation as a mountain man is commemorated in the naming of the Aiguille Forbes and the Forbes Arête in the Alps and of Mount Forbes in both Canada and New Zealand’ (ODNB). This edition collects Forbes’s Travels through the Alps of Savoy and other parts of the Pennine chain; Journals of Excursions in the High Alps of Dauphiné, Berne, and Savoy; Pedestrianism in Switzerland; and Topography of the Chain of Mont Blanc.
Nephew of Quintino Sella (founder of the Club Alpino Italiano), Guido Rey is particularly noted for his ascents of the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc. His published works include Il monte Cervino (1904) and Alpinismo acrobatico (1914).
