The first English-language biography of one of the most renowned Italian climbers, Emilio Comici, who bagged over 200 first ascents in the Eastern Alps prior to his death at 39 years of age in 1940.Between 1925 and his death in 1940, Emilio Comici was the pre-eminent climber in the Eastern Alps, the hotbed of global rock climbing at that time. He made first ascents on some of the highest and most notorious walls in the Alps, including the northwest face of the Civetta, as well as dozens of other climbs.
Comici invented many modern big-wall techniques and the big-wall idiom itself that later took root in Yosemite Valley. Comici also made solo ascents of some of the hardest routes in the Alps, including his climb on the north face of the Cima Grande. He also designed the first artificial climbing wall that was ever actually built.
This book explores how family tragedy and growing up in working class Trieste under Austrian occupation shaped Comici's complex personality and attitudes toward climbing. He was loyal to his friends, deeply concerned about the vulnerable, including his fellow climbers, and yet highly competitive, a born vagabond and yet also a dandy, irresistible to women, and yet unable to settle down, devoted to his mother and to the mountains, and finally, like many other Italian climbers of the period, a member of the Italian fascist party although he was profoundly anti-German and opposed to racial persecution.
The first English-language biography of one of the most renowned Italian climbers, Emilio Comici, who bagged over 200 first ascents in the Eastern Alps prior to his death at 39 years of age in 1940.
Praise for
Paul Preuss: Life and Death at the Birth of Free-Climbing:
Shortlisted for the 2019 Boardman Tasker Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Banff Mountain Book Award for Mountain Literature
"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
"Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss is a skillfully written and meticulously researched book." - Climber Magazine UK
"David Smart has offered the reader an insightful portrait of an intriguing young man so strong in body and mind." - Climber Magazine UK
"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." - Climber Magazine UK
"[Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss] is an intriguing dive into the [Preuss'] life and accomplishments?" - Revelstoke Mountaineer
