Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss Life and Death at the Birth of Free-Climbing

By publisher:

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; and he is the co-author with Brandon Pullan of Northern Stone: 50 of Canada’s Best Rock Climbs. He is the editorial director of Gripped Publishing and is still an active new-router in northern Ontario. David lives in Toronto, Ontario.

“The finest biography of an adventure figure I have ever found. I cringe to think of the years of research needed to dog down all the information, more than a century after it happened. And the journalistic chops to frame it all so cogently made me jealous of Smart as a writer.”  -John Long, author of The Stonemasters: California Rock Climbers in the Seventies, The High Lonesome: Epic Solo Climbing Stories and Long on Adventure: The Best of John Long.

“Smart…has intricately woven stories of Preuss’ life and accomplishments with vivid illustrations of the times and the rising middle class in the outdoors into a magnificent biography.”
– The Suburban Mountaineer

“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 Honnold’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.”
– Mountain Life Annual

“This book’s sub-subhead – Life and Death at the Birth of Free Climbing – attempts to summarize a formative period immediate post Europe’s Golden Age of Alpinism, when mountaineering, rock-climbing and skiing were changing public perception of the mountains that had surrounded them forever.”
– Mountain Life Annual