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John Muir: A Miscellany
Laurie Battle (ed.)
*John Muir: A Miscellany* is a compact, well-chosen gathering of the great naturalist's writing, edited by Laurie Battle and issued by the English house Galileo Publishers in 2017 with illustrations by the artist Tom Killion. Muir — the Scottish-born American wanderer whose rapturous prose helped save Yosemite and launch the national-park idea — is represented here in miniature: passages on mountains, glaciers, storms, and solitude, distilled for readers who want the essence rather than the collected works. It is the sort of handsome little anthology made for a rucksack or a bedside table. For newcomers it is an inviting doorway into Muir; for the already devoted it is a pleasing keepsake, a reminder of why his voice still carries in an age that needs its argument for wildness.
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The subject
John Muir (1838–1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, writer, and campaigner whose ecstatic accounts of the Sierra Nevada helped establish Yosemite as a national park and who co-founded the Sierra Club. More than a century after his death he remains the patron saint of American wilderness preservation, and his prose is a large part of why.
The book
Edited by Laurie Battle for Galileo Publishers of Cambridge, England, and published in 2017, this miscellany selects short passages from across Muir's writing and pairs them with illustrations by the California printmaker Tom Killion. It is designed as a portable sampler rather than a comprehensive edition — an introduction and a keepsake in one.
How to read it
Dip in anywhere. The brevity is the appeal: a page or two of Muir on a mountain morning is a complete experience, and the anthology format makes it easy to find the passages that first hooked generations of readers.
For more context
Those it converts can go on to Muir's fuller books, especially The Mountains of California and My First Summer in the Sierra.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Laurie Battle (ed.)
- Publisher
- Galileo Publishers
- Place of publication
- Cambridge, England
- Year
- 2017
- Edition
- New edition (2019)
- ISBN
- 978-1-912916-09-2
- Shelf
- Nature
- Location
- Maine