Adrian Berry and John Arran have been hard at work on the follow-up to the highly acclaimed Sport Climbing + which we published last December. SC+ was the first book in what will hopefully become a full series of Performance books from Rockfax and was an interesting departure from our normal guidebooks.

The main aim of the ‘Plus’ series is not to produce straight instruction books - there are plenty of these around already - but to focus on all aspects of climbing performance to help climbers acheive their potential by refining their approach rather than indulging in intense training regimes.

We are also working on Winter Climbing + and Alpine Climbing +.

You can read a bit more about Trad Climbing + here.

The image is an example double page spread from the new book.

July sees the publication of the latest two ROCKFAX guides - Peak NE Pokketz and Peak SE Pokketz. These two new books are in a new format for Rockfax - the Pokketz format. They are A6 in size, which is half the dimensions of our normal books, and also contain fewer pages making them incredibly light - around 120g - and easy to carry when climbing.

The full benefit of the small size will probably be more apparent once we start producing books to sea cliffs and multi-pitch route on mountain crags; we have a couple in the pipeline for 2008 that should fully exploit the size. However, even for the smaller Peak crags these books will be useful for those wanting to keep there sacks down when getting a quick hit, or for those people who are on a tight budget and don’t want to pay for a whole bunch of hard routes they are never going to climb.