David Smart: Award-Winning Author, Editor, Climber
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Time to read 5 min
MEET DAVID SMART...
David Smart has been climbing since 1975 throughout North America and Europe. He has completed hundreds of new routes in eastern Canada and is the founder of Gripped, Canada’s Climbing Magazine, Canadian Running magazine, Canadian Cycling Magazine and Triathlon Magazine Canada. He is also the author of five climbing guidebooks; a memoir entitled A Youth Wasted Climbing, short-listed by the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival in 2015; Paul Preuss: Life and Death at the Birth of Free-Climbing, short-listed for awards by both the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival and The Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature (UK); and Emilio Comici: Angel of the Dolomites. He is the editorial director of Gripped Publishing and is still an active new-router in northern Ontario. David lives in Canmore, Alberta.
A YOUTH WASTED CLIMBING
May 2015 | $20.00
★ SHORTLISTED for the 2015 Banff Mountain Book Award for Mountain Literature
"There is a natural rhythm to the book that makes it a joy to read: pure and simple. Bloody brilliant..." —Paul Pritchard, author
David Smart took it as a compliment when his high school vice-principal told him he was wasting his youth by climbing. Here, he tells the story of how he and his brother, Reg, spent the last years of the 1970s fighting suburban boredom to become, in the words of renowned climbing historian Chic Scott, “one of the leading figures in Ontario rock climbing throughout the 1980s.”
With its vivid accounts of short and nasty climbs, dubious mentors, hapless climbing partners, teenage crushes, bad cars, underage drinking and questionable climbing techniques, this is a memoir of coming of age in a simpler era of climbing, told with compassion, humour and insight.
Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss
Life and Death at the Birth of Free-Climbing
July 2019 | $32.00
★ SHORTLISTED for the 2019 Boardman Tasker Award
★ SHORTLISTED for the 2019 Banff Mountain Book Award for Mountain Literature
"The finest biography of an adventure figure I have ever found..." —John Long, acclaimed rock climber and author of more than forty titles
Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss is an intriguing biography of the renowned Austrian alpinist Paul Preuss, who achieved international recognition both for his remarkable solo ascents and for his advocacy of an ethically "pure" alpinism. This is the first English language volume to be published and is certain to bring the remarkable story of Paul Preuss to a whole new generation of climbers.
In the months before his death in 1913, from falling more than 300 metres during an attempt to make the first free solo ascent of the North Ridge of the Mandlkogel, Paul Preuss’s public presentations on his climbing adventures filled concert halls in Austria, Italy, and Germany.
George Mallory, the famed English mountaineer who died on Mount Everest in 1924, said "no one will ever equal Preuss."
Reinhold Messner, the first climber to ascend all fourteen 8000 metre peaks, was so impressed by the young Austrian’s achievements that he built a mountaineering museum around Preuss’s piton hammer, wrote two books (in German) about him and instituted a foundation in Preuss’s name.
Alex Honnold, the first and only person to free solo El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, has thought about Preuss' untimely and surprising death and imagined it to have likely been "the worst four seconds" of Preuss' life.
Although he died at only 27 years old, modern climbing may never have developed the ethical, existential core that it has today if not for Preuss’s bold style. Even the most trenchant traditionalists remain unsure about whether to add him to their pantheon or dismiss him as at worst a lunatic or at best an indelicate subject better left ignored.
Emilio Comici:
Angel of the Dolomites
September 2020 | $32.00
★WINNER of the Banff Mountain Book Competition: Climbing Literature Award
"Emilio Comici: Angel of the Dolomites cements David Smart as one of the most important mountain biographers of our time. He's proven, once again, that he's a master of meticulous research, expert at unweaving a myth from a man, and uniquely able to offer insight in how time, and place, and mountains themselves, all work to shape the character of a mountain life." —Geoff Powter, author of Inner Ranges and Survival Is Not Assured, among others
The first English-language biography of one of the most renowned Italian climbers, Emilio Comici, who bagged over 200 first ascents in the Eastern Alps prior to his death at 39 years of age in 1940. He made first ascents on some of the highest and most notorious walls in the Alps, including the northwest face of the Civetta.
Comici invented many modern big-wall techniques and the big-wall idiom itself that later took root in Yosemite Valley. Comici also made solo ascents of some of the hardest routes in the Alps, including his climb on the north face of the Cima Grande. He also designed the first artificial climbing wall that was ever actually built.
This book explores how family tragedy and growing up in working class Trieste under Austrian occupation shaped Comici’s complex personality and attitudes toward climbing. He was loyal to his friends, deeply concerned about the vulnerable, including his fellow climbers, and yet highly competitive, a born vagabond and yet also a dandy, irresistible to women, and yet unable to settle down, devoted to his mother and to the mountains, and finally, like many other Italian climbers of the period, a member of the Italian fascist party although he was profoundly anti-German and opposed to racial persecution.
COMING THIS FALL FROM DAVID SMART...
Among the Pale Spires:
The Life and Verse of Antonia Pozzi, Alpine Poet
“Biographer David Smart has a way of reaching the soul of his subject without anything of himself emerging on the page. In her brief life, Pozzi existed in the shadow of fascism, rebelling with climbing as her tool and poetry as her language. Smart enables Pozzi to escape from being a tragic footnote in a long list of Italy’s climbers and writers and brings her to resonance as a burst of intensity, rebellion, dissent, and beauty…always, beauty.”
—Nandini Purandare, co-author of Headstrap: Legends and Lore from the Climbing Sherpas of Darjeeling
Discover the hidden world of Antonia Pozzi, a poet whose words echoed the majesty of the Alps and the depths of the human heart.
In Among the Pale Spires, award-winning and internationally renowned mountain writer David Smart introduces readers to the extraordinary life and verse of Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938), an Italian poet whose work remained largely unpublished during her lifetime. Set against the dramatic backdrop of pre-WWII Italy and the rise of fascism, Pozzi's story is one of personal rebellion, artistic passion, and an unwavering connection to the natural world.
Smart's insightful biography reveals Pozzi's struggles with mental health, the societal pressures she faced as a woman from a privileged background, and her profound love for the mountains that inspired her most powerful verses. Through meticulous analysis, Smart unveils the layers of meaning in Pozzi's poetry, showcasing her unique ability to blend nature, emotion, and existential questioning.
“David Smart traces the life and poetry of Antonia Pozzi with depth and clarity, and she emerges from his vision as a tour de force – unredacted, thrilling, and politically resonant. Through his own brilliant lyricism, Smart affirms Pozzi’s singular way of writing about the natural world, particularly her profound engagement with mountain landscapes as spaces of resistance. In doing so, he immortalizes her place in literary history while further establishing himself as a distinguished and authoritative voice in the field of historical mountain writing.”
—Faye Latham, poet and author of British Mountaineers
