"One of the first Alpine climbers
to employ photography"

GEORGE, H. B. THE OBERLAND AND ITS GLACIERS: EXPLORED AND ILLUSTRATED WITH ICE-AX AND CAMERA. London: Alfred W. Bennett, 1866. 4to. Original green gilt- and blind-stamped cloth over beveled boards, with gilt motif on front cover. A.e.g. Half-title. xii, 243 pages. Double-page map, twenty-eight mounted albumen photographic prints by Ernest Edwards, including eleven full-page prints with tissue guards. Slight wear to extremities, one gathering pulled, endpapers lightly foxed, otherwise a fine copy.

FIRST EDITION of the first book by Hereford Brooke George (1838-1910), the English historical writer, founder of the Oxford Alpine Club and "one of the first Alpine climbers to employ photography" (DNB). In The Oberland And Its Glaciers, George combined photographs of glaciers and Alpine scenery with a descriptive narrative because, at the time, "no book on glacier theory yet published contain[ed] any large number of illustrations" (Preface).

Ernest Edwards (1837-1903), who accompanied George on his expedition, produced the "prized examples of early mountain photographs" (Neate) in The Oberland And Its Glaciers, including images of the Grindelwald, Jungfrau and Rhone [See image above.] glaciers and of the surrounding mountains. Edwards is also known as the inventor of the "Heliotype," a collotype process of reproducing photographs which he patented shortly after publication of The Oberland And Its Glaciers. "Because collotype allowed printing directly on the sheet that would be bound into the book," it was an important advance in printing technology, and "[b]y the 1880s the collotype process had been perfected to become the cheapest and most reliable method of attaining high-quality facsimiles of photographs in printer's ink" (The Truthful Lens).

As the world's glaciers shrink and disappear under the onslaught of global warming, photographs such as those in The Oberland And Its Glaciers may be all that preserve a visual record of these "rivers of ice" and their cold beauty. Gernsheim 327. Neate 305. The Truthful Lens 74. BT000093.

$1500

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