Nan Shepherd : The Living Mountain : Cairngorm Mountains : 1st/1st 1977

The Living Mountain : A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland

By Nan Shepherd

Published by Aberdeen University Press, 1977. First Edition. Paperback book with 95 pages. With 12 full-page black-and-white illustrations by Ian Munro as well as a hand-drawn map of the Cairngorm plateau.

CONDITION
A good copy. The covers and spine are in good condition as can be seen in the images provided. Small inscription to inside front cover. Pages clean throughout.

Shepherd wrote the manuscript around 1944–1945, which sat in one of her drawers gathering dust until she rediscovered it while tidying up, realised it was still valid, and had it published by Aberdeen University Press in October 1977.   Because it was effectively self-published with no formal marketing, Shepherd gave a large portion of these copies away to friends, family, and colleagues. The book fell into relative obscurity at the time and when Shepherd passed away four years later in 1981, many of those original 3,000 copies were still left in storage boxes.

The remaining warehouse or institutional stock held by Aberdeen University Press trickled slowly into local Scottish libraries, universities, and small Aberdeenshire bookshops over the next decade. Because she had a strong literary reputation in Scotland from her early 1930s novels, the boxes weren't thrown away; they were just incredibly slow to clear out until nature writers like Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey sparked a massive global revival decades later.

Anna "Nan" Shepherd (11 February 1893 – 27 February 1981) was a Scottish modernist writer and poet, who authored the memoir, The Living Mountain, based on experiences of hill walking in the Cairngorms. The work has been cited as influential by nature writers Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She also wrote poetry and three novels set in small fictional communities in Northern Scotland. The landscape and weather of this area play a major role in her novels and provide a focus for her poetry.

For most of her working life, Shepherd was a lecturer in English at the Aberdeen College of Education. Shepherd was friends with writers Agnes Mure Mackenzie and Neil M. Gunn and a mentor to Jessie Kesson.

(GC4)