The Alpine Journal is the journal of the Alpine Club, the oldest mountaineering club in the world, and was first published in 1863. The project to make the contents available free on-line began in 2009 - for more details click here. All of the 6,649 articles published in the AJ up to and including 2020 are now on-line, as well the chapters of its predecessor 'Peaks, Passes and Glaciers' (1860-1862).
If you have comments or suggestions on improving the site or have discovered bugs or errors, please contact us.
All material contained on this site, including digital copies of articles and illustrations from the Alpine Journal, is copyright and should not be reproduced without permission of the Alpine Club. Readers are encouraged to use it for their own research, under the 'fair use' provisions of international copyright legislation, but may not publish or redistribute it, either in print or via their own web site.
Copyright of individual articles/illustrations within Alpine Journal is owned by the author or authors and their permission is required for further use. The Alpine Club hold the copyright for presentational aspects of the work, including layout and typography and their permission is also required for further reproduction of the pdfs.
The development of the site and the electronic publication of the Alpine Journal, has only been possible because of the assistance of a wide variety of individuals. These include: past Hon. Editors of the Journal Alan Blackshaw, John Fairley, Ernst Sondheimer, Johanna Merz, Ed Douglas, Bernard Newman and Steve Goodwin; their Assistant editors; and Editors of the Area Notes.
Thanks also to all those authors who agreed to their work appearing in the digital version of the Journal and all the members of the Alpine Club who helped in tracing them, in particular George Band, Alan Blackshaw, Derek Buckle, Francoise Call, Charles Clarke, John Cleare, Mick Fowler, John Harlin (USA), Iwonna and Tadeusz Hudowski (Polish authors), Harish Kapadia (India), Hywel Lloyd, Lindsay Griffin, Johanna Merz, Tom Nakamura (Japan), Piero Nava, Roger Payne, Simon Richardson (Scotland), Bill Ruthven (MEF), Victor Saunders, Martin Scott, Stephen Venables and Derek Walker. Thanks also to Klara Esters (DAV), Jonas Paulsson (SKF) Martina Pfurtscheller (OAV) and Cristina Reposi (CAI).
Thanks finally to Robin Quine (Alpine Club) and Shiona Dawson for proof-reading and suggesting improvements to the site. Also to Claire "Suzy" Campbell (tanfa.co.uk) for the elegant coding for the css image map rollovers, and Philip Regan for Simple Cataloger 3. Map images were sourced from Google Maps and Digital Wisdom (Mountain High Maps).
Technical Notes
The text of each article published before 2010 has been automatically converted into digital form using optical character recognition (OCR) software and is included in the pdf files available on the site. The digital text has not been checked or corrected, since it would have meant checking every word (c24 million) of over 6,000 articles. Since The accuracy of OCR is typically around 97%, there are errors. This means that the full text search will not find instances of the word searched for in which the OCR failed to recognise it properly. In practice names of mountains and individuals are usually duplicated within articles and sometimes contained within contents pages and filenames, which mitigates the problem substantially.
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