VICTORIOUS MOUNTAINEER A Memoir of Harry Peirce Nichols, PLUS, original signed photograph
Cloister Press, Louisville, 1943, 1943. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good+ / No Jacket. Item #0603124
Small 8vo cloth. 78pp. Illustrated with chapter head drawings. Frontispiece portrait: "Harry Peirce Nichols in the Canadian Rockies in his eightieth year." Inscribed by Stevens on the ffep. A good, if short, biography of the well-known mountaineering Episcopal priest & pastor of several churches, including Holy Trinity Church in Harlem. Lightly soiled, but vg. No dj. Very scarce. ALONG WITH LARGE ORIGINAL black & white PHOTOGRAPH of Nichols, and signed by him, "Affectionately Yours Harry Peirce Nichols", on the mat, to which the photo is glued. Silver print, size: 10 3/4" x 11 7/8". The image is of Nichols sitting atop a rock formation on a mountain top, location unidentified (hazy back ground). Nichols, who appears to be in his 60s or early 70s, is dressed in climbing clothing, with hat on his head, & is pointing beyond the left of the image with outstretched arm, tilted slightly upwards. He is looking towards a focal point, as if to another mountain. The Rev. Nichols' mountaineering credentials are as impressive as his ecclesiastical ones: from 1881 a member of Appalachian Alpine Club. One of the founders & a president of the American Alpine Club. Founder of the Harvard Alpine Club. "For more than sixty years he climbed in the White Mountains", climbing Mount Washington over 250 times. Charles Wilcox's great work on the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia devotes several pages to Nichols' account of being one of the first American climbers in those high & rugged mountains west of the Canadian Rockies. He ascended Mt. Fox in 1893. The photo is in an old frame & is in excellent condition. A most collectable & rare combination.
Price: $495.07