Books published by publisher Gibson Square Books Ltd

When he came across an old-English limerick that made him laugh, playwright Ranjit Bolt started writing nonsensical verse to entertain his friends. On a whim he decided to staple some together and offer them at a market in his home town of Cambridge when not writing plays. Readers would go away chuckling to themselves and the booklets flew away. Their chuckling response led to A Lion Was Learning to Ski.

'Compelling pieces.' Stephen Venables, Mail on Sunday 'Invaluable... [a] surprise it has taken so long to see the light of day.' National Geographic 'Expressive and emotionally literate.' Scottish Mountaineer In Climbing Everest, George Mallory (18 June 1886 - 8/9 June 1924), possibly the first man to summit Everest, takes us with him on his climbs in Britain and the Alps, culminating in his three expeditions to Mount Everest - the last of which cost him his life (a few days after the final piece in this book). Mallory was one of the first climbers to explore the emotional meaning of climbing, discarding the Edwardian stiff upper lip in the face of adventure. All his writings on climbing - here collected for the first time - started out as letters to his wife Ruth. He turned them into finely-crafted pieces read by climbers as well as arm-chair climbers.

Collection of published writings on the Everest by George Mallory, the man who may have been the first man to reach its top 29 years before Hillary. George Mallory belongs to a short but distinguished line of literary mountaineers such as Joe Simpson, Jon Krakauer and Edward Whymper, the conqueror of the Matterhorn. He answered the questioned 'Why climb Everest' with the dry put down 'Because it is there.' In this book his published writings on Everest are collected for the first time.

Diaries of Nansen's lunatic three-year long expedition to the North Pole, which made him the John Krakauer of his age. In 1893 Fridtjof Nansen set sail for the North Pole in the Fram, a ship specially designed to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures, and so drift North. Experts said that such a mission was tantamount to suicide. This is the stirring first-person account of this historic voyage. Nansen tells of his expedition's struggle against snowdrifts, ice floes, polar bears, scurvy, gnawing hunger, and the seemingly endless polar night that transformed the Fram into a "cold prison of loneliness." Setting out in the end on a harrowing fifteen-month sledge journey to reach his destination by foot, he was required them to share a sleeping bag of rotting reindeer fur and to feed the weaker sled dogs to the stronger ones. Given up for dead, he traveled 146 miles farther north than anyone else in the past four hundred years.