How Mountaineers Books built a publishing empire

SEATTLE — Among the helmets, harnesses and crampons at any serious outdoor store, you’ll likely find another climbing essential: the Seattle-born bible of mountaineering that launched a publishing empire.

“Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills,” the reference book first published in 1960, has sold over 1 million copies worldwide. It’s the flagship publication of Seattle’s Mountaineers Books, which released the 10th edition of “Freedom” last month.

In consultation with professional guides, members of The Mountaineers updated the 10th edition with the latest info on mountain safety, gear and equipment, drawing from their experience as volunteer instructors of the club’s climbing courses.

Unlike the first edition, today’s textbook is just the tip of the ice ax.

These days, Mountaineers Books produces dozens of titles annually: hiking guidebooks, alpinist nonfiction, field identification guides, ecological poetry and more. The publisher has become the English-speaking world’s preeminent independent publisher of outdoors and conservation titles.

But The Mountaineers never set out to enter the books business. This publishing juggernaut, whose titles define contemporary mountain culture and make powerful cases for the world’s most pressing environmental causes, almost never came to be.

As the publisher prepares to celebrate the 10th edition of “Freedom,” Mountaineers Books owes the text a debt of gratitude.

“Everything we do today touches back on that ethic of being rooted in a community and a love of nature and the outdoors,” said Kate Rogers, Mountaineers Books editor in chief. “Today, we have books on backyard gardening or bird-watching in your local park. We are so much more than ‘Freedom’ now, but it remains a touchstone for us all these years later.”

From coursework to “Freedom”

The year is 1935. You live in Seattle, where you’ve spied the Cascades in the distance. You want to climb a mountain, but there are no guiding outfits to hire, nor an REI to outfit yourself. There is however a 22-year-old engineering student at the University of Washington named Wolf Bauer, who is teaching what might be the country’s first climbing course.

Born in the Bavarian Alps, Bauer is a member of The Mountaineers, a nascent club known for running a Snoqualmie Pass lodge and hosting exploratory summertime adventures, like charting the route that eventually becomes the Wonderland Trail in Mount Rainier National Park. Hosting instructional sessions on Little Si in North Bend and at a large glacial boulder in Seattle, Bauer teaches basic techniques for climbing rock, demonstrates how to climb steep snow with an ice ax, and tests students’ fear of falling with the dulfersitz rappel, where the rope is wrapped around the climber’s body. (At the time, harnesses are still unheard of in these parts.)

The course is a success; new instructors are brought on to accommodate an influx of students. There is no North American climbing textbook, so instructors start writing up their own lesson plans on tying knots, orienteering and first aid. In 1948, Seattle’s Superior Publishing Company compiles these outlines as “The Mountaineers Handbook.” The book sells out of stock within six years — but The Mountaineers only accrue royalties, not the full proceeds.

So, in 1955, a 30-year-old Mountaineers member named Harvey Manning, an accomplished climber and writer who would eventually become a legendary Northwest conservationist, begins the process of wrangling authors, photographers and illustrators to create the first edition of “Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills.”

The end result is a who’s-who of midcentury Seattle: photographers Bob and Ira Spring, illustrator Bob Cram, mountaineer and writer Dee Molenaar, REI co-founders Mary and Lloyd Anderson.

But publishing the manuscript required money the club didn’t have. Schisms dating back to Bauer’s establishment of the climbing course (regarded skeptically by the club’s old guard) threatened to derail the project, or split the club into competing factions.

Ultimately, 102 members made pledges to finance the book. If it sold, they would be paid back with interest. If it didn’t, they would at least have a copy of the book.

The club printed 5,000 copies with the expectation the stock would last five years. It sold out within 12 months and every member who pledged was repaid ahead of schedule.

As postwar interest in outdoor recreation grew, sales proceeds from “Freedom” streamed into the club’s coffers, earmarked for future book projects. By the late 1960s, The Mountaineers established a literary fund committee to oversee publishing revenue. Little could those early club members foresee just how much this newfangled book pursuit would grow.

Last publisher standing

Today, Mountaineers Books has a professional staff of 22 with a wealth of industry experience. The publishing house remains under The Mountaineers nonprofit umbrella, and as recently as the early 2000s, club members were still voting on which books to publish. That included poor decisions like passing on “Touching the Void,” the bestselling 1988 account of a climbing accident in the Andes that later became a feature film.

“We had no business telling these professionals how to run their business,” said Mountaineers member and former vice president of publishing Eric Linxweiler, chatting at the Mountaineers Books office on Harbor Island, surrounded by hundreds of original titles.

Mountaineers Books has landed commercial hits despite that meddling, particularly adventure yarns. “Ghosts of Everest” is the 1999 tale of the successful expedition to find the body of fabled Everest victim George Mallory. And, with the professionals in charge, Mountaineers Books published “Reinhold Messner: My Life at the Limit,” an interview-style autobiography of the famed Italian alpinist, in 2014.

These bestsellers — as well as titles under the Skipstone imprint on accessible topics like gardening, biking and wellness — provide the bulk of Mountaineers Books revenue, which tallied over $5 million in the 2023 fiscal year. That reflects an increase of more than more than 30 percent in book sales from 2019.

Those sales underwrite the critical conservation line Braided River. Photography-heavy coffee table books like “To the Arctic” and “The Big Thaw” are expensive to produce and don’t sell like hot cakes, but they can generate donations and impact consistent with The Mountaineers’ environmental ethics.

In that sense, the publishing house still adheres to its founding philosophy, when proceeds from the first edition of “Freedom” funded Manning’s ambitious “Wild Cascades: Forgotten Parkland,” which galvanized the successful lobbying campaign to establish North Cascades National Park.

The Sierra Club’s publishing arm put out that title, but folded in 2015. National Geographic’s books, meanwhile, are distributed by Penguin Random House. Due to consolidation and publishing industry headwinds, Mountaineers Books stands alone in its field.

Mountaineers Books has a hard-earned reputation as a consistent voice for the outdoors and conservation, which gives the independent publisher a competitive edge. Rogers spent nearly a decade convincing snowboarder Jeremy Jones to write a book. The resulting “The Art of Shralpinism” potentially could have gone to a commercial publisher, but Mountaineers Books still invests in development editing with first-time authors, something that has fallen by the wayside at larger publishing houses.

Today, Mountaineers Books helps set the tone of contemporary mountain culture. Both last year’s biography “Royal Robbins” and the 2022 nonfiction work “Imaginary Peaks” won awards at the Banff Mountain Book Competition. And this year’s “Alpine Rising” by Bernadette McDonald turns the traditional expedition account on its head by telling the story of Himalayan climbing from the perspective of the region’s Indigenous people whose unsung feats were critical to Western mountaineers’ glory.

Talent for the 10th

The copy of “Freedom” assigned to Jonathon Spitzer, studying recreation as a Western Colorado University freshman in 2001, was compulsive reading.

“I remember reading page after page just drawn to the information and diagrams,” said Spitzer, today director of operations for Seattle-based guiding company Alpine Ascents International. “I would lay out rope systems and mimic what was in the book just thinking about escaping my college dormitory to go into the mountains.”

Spitzer has traveled the planet to climb, where the book is a constant presence in mountain communities: “I’d be at a tea house in the middle of the Khumbu (Nepal) or in a youth hostel in El Chaltén in Patagonia and find it,” he said.

Spitzer’s career has encompassed five editions of the reference and he praises its editors for keeping up with the fast-changing world of mountaineering. It’s a discipline where rapid advancements in digital technology, materials science, and product design influence thinking about the best ways to navigate in the alpine, forecast high mountain weather, dress for subzero temperatures and rescue a climber in distress.

“This latest version stays true to its legacy while integrating modern advancements,” Spitzer said, “ensuring it remains an essential resource for anyone serious about the sport.”

The endorsement is vindication for lead editor Linxweiler, who took a more assertive approach in the 10th edition to update material contributed by long-dead authors.

Above all, Linxweiler stayed true to the book’s original spirit, hatched almost 90 years ago, when Bauer taught those first climbing courses. The editor’s guiding mantra: “How do I make this a better book for instruction?”