The Alpine Guide, 3 volumes

John Ball’s great Alpine Club guide to the whole chain from the Col di Tenda to Vienna, here in the complete three-volume form it reached in 1868. John Ball (1818–1889), naturalist, politician and first President of the Alpine Club, had edited Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers in 1859. In 1863 he began the Alpine Guide for the Club, followed by the Central Alps in 1864 and the Eastern Alps in 1868. He treated the Alps as a single field, divided by geography and not by political frontier, and did much of the exploration himself between 1860 and 1867, especially in the Eastern Alps. The guide set the pattern for the English-language mountaineering guidebook for a generation. The volumes here are the revised issues of the Western and Central Alps from 1866, with the Eastern Alps in its first edition. Ball’s work was later broken up into smaller regional volumes in 1873. The Alpine Club replaced it in 1898 with a revised edition edited by W. A. B. Coolidge and others. Volume one of this set (Western Alps) contains the long introductory section of over 100 pages, noted by Coolidge in his later revision notes as being called for in early editions of this work. Volumes two and three are believed to have never contained this same introduction, only their own preliminary notes. BALL, John. The Alpine Guide. Volume I: A Guide to the Western Alps. New Edition. Volume II: The Central Alps. New Edition. Volume III: A Guide to the Eastern Alps. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866 (vols. I–II), 1868 (vol. III). Three volumes. Volumes 1 & 2 New Edition, volume 3 First Edition. Small Octavo. Vol. I: cxvi, 404pp.; vol. II: xviii, [ii], 521pp.; vol. III: xxiii, [i], 639pp. Each volume with a folding map frontispiece and numerous folding maps and panoramas; vols. I and II with two larger folding maps in a rear pocket (one linen-backed in each), and vol. III with one larger folding map in a rear pocket, linen-backed. Uniformly rebound in half black Morocco over blue cloth boards, spines decorated and lettered in gilt, top edges gilt, hand-laid endpapers. A little rubbing to the extremities of the covers, otherwise a fine and beautifully preserved set. Former owner's ink signature to the top of each title.…