Mountains – 35 Stories from the World between the Land and the Sky

Florian Weiß & Lucia Jay von Seldeneck
Mountains
35 Stories from the World between the Land and the Sky
Book design: Mara Burmester

A picture book for adults

So you think the mountains can make people happy, I ask him.
Vittorio Sella has photographed every peak in the Alps, hauling his gear up vertical rockfaces and carrying it back down through deep ravines. I want to know what drives him.
Of course they make people happy, Sella says. But it isn’t just the moment when you stand at the summit and look out over the clouds all around. That’s a misconception. It’s about the many other moments too – including the moments of greatest exertion.

Mountains are beyond our understanding, far beyond our sense of being. There’s nothing we can do to change considering that we would have to watch millions and millions of time lapses to understand how they arose from the clash of tectonic plates.
They, on the other hand, have seen the emergence and disappearance of everything that ever was. It is this that makes our heads spin when we reach the summit.
We keep striving, straining higher and higher, but do we really get any closer to understanding the mountains?

In this book author Lucia Jay von Seldeneck and artist Florian Weiss explore our fascination with mountains. In multi-faceted texts and illustrations they present 35 mountains, describing their challenges and individual characters and the longing they inspire.

Look inside