into California
A glorious artist tribute to the Range of Light
The High Sierra of California is a brilliant tribute to the bold, jagged peaks that have inspired generations of naturalists, artists, and writers.
Using traditional Japanese and European woodcut techniques, Killion has created stunning visual images of the Sierra that focus on the backcountry above nine thousand feet, accessible only on foot. Accompanying these riveting images are the journals of Gary Snyder, chronicling more than forty years of travels through the High Sierra backcountry.
“For a fibrillatingly lovely look at the High Sierra, that corner of the state that stays the same while all the rest of California convulses, the book to get this year is Tom Killion and Gary Snyder's art book, The High Sierra of California. ...It is to other coffee-table books what Jamaican Blue Mountain is to other coffee.”
—David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
“Sometimes stately and solemn, sometimes mysterious and mystical, sometimes rollicking and even slightly ribald—[these prints] are the visual equivalent of Snyder's poetry and the real glory of the book.”
—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Awards
Winner of the California Book Award Medal
Woodcut and letterpress artist Tom Killion grew up in Marin County, California, on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where the rugged scenery inspired him from an early age to create landscape prints strongly influenced by traditional Japanese woodblock prints. Along with publishing fine art letterpress books, Killion holds a PhD in African history from Stanford University and has taught history at several Bay Area universities. He is the founder of The Quail Press and his extensively illustrated books include 28 Views of Mount Tamalpais, The Coast of California, and Walls: A Journey Across Three Continents. Killion and Gary Snyder previously collaborated on The High Sierra of California, which was published by Heyday in 2002 and Tamalpais Walking, published in 2009. You can find out more about his artwork at www.tomkillion.com.
Photo by Katsunori Yamazato
Gary Snyder is a poet, author, scholar, cultural critic, and professor emeritus of the University of California at Davis who has published sixteen books of poetry and prose, including The Gary Snyder Reader (1952–1998) . He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975, and his book-length poem Mountains and Rivers Without End won the Bollingen Prize in poetry in 1997. In 2008 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.
