Trad Climbing + is now available for next day delivery from our online ordering and it should reach most outdoor retailers by the weekend.

The book looks really good with the colours as vibrant as we have come to expect. It is always a strange experience these days when a book returns from the printers. Ten years ago it used to be the first time that you had actually seen the book in all its glory. These days pre-press on the screen and proofs are so good that the book hardly even looks new when it lands in your hands. That said, it is always a great feeling that a long project has come to an end.

Sadly it is not a great feeling that I can share with either of the two authors since they are both travelling and are currently both uncontactable. Hopefully they will be back soon and able to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

Our printers have excelled themselves and produced Trad Climbing + a full 10 days earlier than expected. That means the book will be available for dispatch from Monday 26th November and in the shops for the weekend of 1 December.

This is the fastest printing we have ever managed at just 18 days from submitting the disk to having the published books in our hand. Even more amazingly, we actually made some minor changes to the book last week, only 11 days before publication!

These are the benefits we get from using UK printers. Cheaper printing is available elsewhere but I have yet to be convinced by its quality and it is much more difficult to make last minute changes. The turn around time is also, obviously, much longer if the books have to come from China.

You still have a few days left to order a copy at the Special Offer Price of £17.45. (After Monday 26th November the book will be £19.95).

If you desperately want the book for Christmas then you can recommend it as a Christmas present for someone else to buy for you using our Recommend Form.

Trad Climbing + is now at the printers and will be published in the first week in December. As usual we are offering a special offer for pre-orders at £17.45 (plus delivery). This will get the book on your door step a few days after it is published and will be quicker, and cheaper, than any other method.

Pre-order it here

Recommend it as a present (for yourself) here

Download a sample chapter here

For the authors Adrian and John, we are now in the final stages of what has been at least a year-long project for them (infact even longer for Adrian since he was busy getting images for this book last year when he produced Sport Climbing +). We will be going down to the printers in Nottingham on Thursday 15th to see the first sheets rolling off the press. It is always a fun experience but also a useful one where we often make very slight adjustments to the colour to make sure it looks absolutely spot on.

The printing itself takes a couple of long sessions over two or three days before the ‘running sheets’ (large single sheets with 32 A5 pages on them) are cut and collated ready for thread sewing and binding. This is usually the only delay in the process since binders are in short supply in this country and we actually had to book them two months ahead. Once the books are sewn and bound they are then quickly boxed and sent off to the distributors in Leicester and Rock + Run in the Lakes for the online orders. Rock and Run generally turn round all the online pre-orders in a couple of days at most.

Mike Robertson’s superb Deep Water book has won the Mountain Exposition prize at the Banff Mountain Book Festival. The prize winners were announced on Friday 1 November and I got the text message from Mike at around 3am to tell me the good news. Mike had flown out the same day and landed only 3 hours before the evening prize giving started at an airport 70 miles away! But he made it in time.

The full list of prize winners is up on the Banff MBF web site. Another winner was Stephen Venables with his book Higher Than the Eagle Soars so, all in all, it was a great showing for the Brits, especially after the BMC’s success last year with their Burbage, Millstone and Beyond book. The BMC also entered their Stanage guide this year and this was chosen as one of the seven finalists in the Mountain Exposition category.

Here’s what Mike Robertson said about the award:

I heard about Deep Water’s position in the final with just 30 hours to spare before the ceremony, and got the next flight out, finally arriving in Banff with an hour left… Banff is a beautiful town, and the Festival itself is an incredible event; it’s a real high to win the Mountain Exposition category. Of course it’s a team win; without Mark and Alan at Rockfax, this just wouldn’t have been possible – as big thanks to them for all their support.

We are coming to the end of the Yorkshire Gritstone Bouldering guide and have decided to offer it at special offer to clear out the last of the stock. From now until we run out of stock the book will only cost £5 plus shipping for web site orders.

Order your copy here.

The Yorkshire Gritstone Bouldering book was first published in 2000 and was put together by Alan Cameron-Duff. It is in black and white mainly throughout and was the first book to document many of the areas covered. Alan initially compiled the book himself with a view to publishing it himself under the ‘Stone’ name he had established for the Merseyside Sandstone guide he wrote with Pete Chadwick, however he approached me to make it a Rockfax early in 2000 and we were able to get the book out later that year.

Since then it has proved a popular book but sales never quite lived up to the more popular, but arguably less good, bouldering further south in the Peak. Now that our production techniques have moved on so much in recent years, the overall look of the book appears a little dated. The information though remains as good as it was in 2002 for the majority of the problems especially for those operating in the lower grades.

For most of the year Chris Craggs has been hard at work on our new Northern England guide and we had hoped to publish this before Christmas. Now that we have started the final stages of production it has become clear that, to acheive a pre-Christmas publication, we are going to have to rush the final layout stages. We don’t want to do this so we have decided to delay until early in the New Year - apologies to anyone who was hoping to have a copy for Christmas.

This is the first publication date we have missed for the last two years and is just a blip rather than a trend. It is probably due to us trying to squeeze an extra two publications into the year’s schedule (and some moving house complications!) .

Next year’s provisional plans include firstly Northern England, then we are aiming to get a comprehensive print guide to Lofoten. We also have Winter Climbing + by Neil Gresham and Ian Parnell, and two Pokketz guides - Welsh Mountain Classics by Jack Geldard, and Pembroke by Mike Robertson and Alan James. There may also be time to squeeze in a new El Chorro area guide by the end of the year if we are lucky but we don’t want to over-stretch ourselves.

This month sees the introduction of a new section to the site - Rockfax Blogs. These will work in much the same way as other blogs elsewhere but the intention is to bring together blogs with a climbing and mountaineering theme under one roof.

Rockfax Blogs are open to everyone, all you need to do is create, or log into, your Rockfax user account, and you will be able to start blogging.

If you have a Blog elsewhere then it is possible to use the admin functions to import it into the Rockfax Blogs relatively easily - see this help page.

So, if you have been on a trip, got a good story to tell, know of a great new crag which you want to publicise, or just generally like exposing your thoughts on the Internet, then set up a Rockfax Blog and target the climbers who will be interested in what you have to say.

If you are unsure how to start a blog then check out our Help Pages.

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.