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Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss

Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss

Life and Death at the Birth of Free-Climbing
ISBN: 9781771603232
$32.00
  • Hardback Paper over boards

Shortlisted for the 2019 Boardman Tasker Award

Shortlisted for the 2019 Banff Mountain Book Award for Mountain Literature

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 (meaning without any artificial aids).

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.

Smart's biography 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.

Book Details

248

July 30, 2019

Width: 5.50 in
Height: 8.50 in

"Paul Preuss - Lord of the Abyss is a skillfully written and meticulously researched book." "Was [Preuss] a patriarch or pariah? The argument continues, yet the path Preuss set, which has wound through climbing for a century, led directly to Alex Honnald's successful free solo on Yosemite's fearsome El Capitan. As such, this book introduces the origin of the notion to a new generation of climbers." "Climbers talk of 'feeding the rat', a hunger to climb more and more and David reflects that, for Paul, climbing in a pure style was his 'food for immortality', a food which carried him to the most beautiful places on so many extraordinary adventures."