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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.

Fleming's book is the easiest introduction.

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.

If you're looking for specific accounts, My Climbs in The Alps and Caucasus and Scrambles Amongst The Alps are good too.