Everest 1933 (First Edition)

RUTTLEDGE, Hugh (foreword Sir Francis Younghusband). Everest 1933. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1934.

Royal 8vo. Original blue publisher's cloth. Spine lettered and ruled in gilt. Cover margins in blind. Original unclipped dust jacket. xv, 389 pp. Photographic frontispiece and 58 sepia photographic plates throughout; 3 in-text diagrams; 4 maps, including 3 large folding. Index. First edition. Several contemporary newspaper clippings covering the expedition loosely inserted at front. Provenance: from the library of Warwick H. Williams.

The 1933 British Everest expedition was, in every sense, an expedition conducted in the shadow of its predecessor. Nine years earlier, in June 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine had disappeared into cloud somewhere high on the mountain's northeast ridge, last glimpsed by a fellow expedition member "going strong for the top" — and had never been seen again, their fate one of the great unresolved questions of twentieth-century exploration. No British expedition had returned to Everest in the intervening nine years. Hugh Ruttledge (1884–1961) led the team that finally did, a strong party that included Frank Smythe, Eric Shipton, Percy Wyn Harris, Lawrence Wager, and Jack Longland, operating under the joint auspices of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club.

The expedition's most historically resonant moment came during the summit attempt by Wyn Harris and Wager from the famous Camp VI, made in an effort to determine whether the mountain's forbidding "Second Step" could be climbed. At approximately 27,760 feet, the pair came upon an ice axe lying on a slab of rock — an object that could only have belonged to Mallory or Irvine, dropped or discarded nine years earlier on their own fateful summit attempt. The discovery, now preserved by the Alpine Club, offered the first physical evidence of the two climbers' final movements and has remained central to the enduring mystery of what happened to them — whether they reached the summit before their deaths, a question that continues to be debated by mountaineering historians to this day. Harris and Wager found the Second Step unclimbable and were forced to traverse the North Face instead, and on the return to high camp, Wager became the first man to look down upon the mountain's formidable East Face. The expedition's high point, reached by three separate climbers including Frank Smythe, was 28,126 feet — a mark that would stand as the highest altitude achieved on Everest without supplementary oxygen for more than four decades.

Ruttledge's own account of the climb, published the following year as the official narrative of the expedition, is written with a gravity appropriate to its subject. He described the ambition to climb Everest as touching upon "the loftiest spiritual height of man's imagination," and wrote that the record of the climbers' efforts "has come to be an inspiration not only to mountaineers and geographers, but also to that far more numerous host of humble yet ambitious strivers after the topmost pinnacle of achievement in the varied branches of human activity." Everest 1933 remains one of the essential primary accounts in the literature of Himalayan mountaineering, and copies retaining the original, genuinely fragile dust jacket — as this one does — are consistently and specifically noted by specialist dealers as scarce.

Very good in good dust jacket. Dust jacket unclipped, spine browned with some cracking and chipping. Previous repair made to inside lower spine. Cover boards have some bumping to corners and very mild darkening to spine. Contents in excellent condition. Some foxing present on preliminaries and along edges. Pages generally clean, fresh, and bright. Folding maps in fine condition, free from markings and tearing.

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Catalogue Number: ON00126.