Does anyone have a recommendation for a book chronicling the history of climbing in the Alps? It seems that "Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps" by Fergus Fleming is a popular one on Amazon.com. An interesting read is more important to me than excessive detail.
I have Killing Dragons. It's a very good book. Slightly slow in places but well worth owning.
Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination was very good until it got wet and wrecked in a tent when I was halfway through. I really need to get a new copy of it because I was loving that.
Jim Ring's How the English Made the Alps is also readable and goes a bit into the 20th century.
MacFarlane's Mountains of the Mind mixes alpine history with his own first-person memoirs. Much of his account of the discovery of mountains is drawn from Marjorie Hope Nicolson's Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory. (There's a brief summary of that literature at http://alpinehistory.com/.)
Jouty and Frison-Roche's A History of Mountain Climbing is a usable coffee-table style survey.
There's stacks of stuff if you read German or French.