New York, AAC, 1948 1st edition. 64 pp, paperback, Fine condition.
1948 was the first issue of Accidents in American Mountaineering, the report of the previous year's mountaineering accidents by the Safety Committee of the American Alpine Club and later, the Alpine Club of Canada.
The yearly book on climbing accidents in the US and Canada did not start out as a separate book as we know it today. As climbing started its climb from being an invisible sport that was known and followed by a few dozen, perhaps a few hundred people, the thousands of men who were trained as climbers in the 10th Mt Division during WW2 started climbing and teaching their friends. However, many other people also started climbing without knowing how to climb safely, and in 1947 there started to be what seemed a torrent of deaths in the mountains.
The members of the American Alpine Club felt that they had a responsibility help reduce all those deaths, by spreading knowledge of what went wrong on each climb, and analyzing what could have prevented the mishaps.
Initially the club wrote an article in the yearly journal about this new problem. It also became obvious that to spread the word the accident article should be reprinted at low cost and made available to the climbing community. That is what caused the creation of the yearly report we now know as Accidents in American Climbing starting in 2016.
The yearly accident report was called Accidents in North American Mountaineering until 2015.
The accident pamphlet is the initial manifestation of the AAC doing its part in making climbing safer. The reprints continued, and then was broken off as the stand alone booklet we have today. The booklet's cover title initially varied, such as ALPINE ACCIDENTS and some others. Luckily it settled down to what we know. It was callled just American and not North American, before 1957, when the ACC started adding its reports to the AAC.
A few years ago the nature of climbing had changed so much that, with millions of people rock climbing in gyms, and rock climbing and sport climbing outdoors at a high standard, with no desire to do multi day wilderness climbs, the word Mountaineering was deleted and Climbing was substituted.
This is the chronology of the Accidents booklet and its name:
1948 Mountaineering Safety
1949 Safety In The Mountains
1950 Safety and the Climber
1951 Alpine Accidents
1952-1960 Accidents in American Mountaineering
1997 Accidents in Canadian Mountaineering (1997 only)
1961-2015 Accidents in North American Mountaineering
2016- to date Accidents in North American Climbing
