Letters: Bibliographer's Dream, Oslo by the Book

Your article “Dusty Passion: Books on Skiing” (November-December 2022) delighted this old librarian/bibliographer’s heart. To think that you and possibly other collectors of skiing books may use Yaple numbers to order their shelves gives me an altogether superior thrill. Abundant thanks! In the 10 years spent discovering ski book citations, it never crossed my mind that Ski Bibliography might be utilized to order collections of ski books.. However, the professional librarian’s first duty is to “organize information so it can be found.”

A warning to ski book collectors: I have a second bibliography, published in 2014, entitled A Descriptive Bibliography of Israelite Imprints from The Israelite House of David and Mary’s City of David, 1902–2010. Obviously, ski books and Israelite imprints share nothing in common, but to avoid confusion I would suggest Y-X for a reference to the ski bibliography and Y1-X or Y2-X for the two versions of the Israelite list. Thus, there may be a reference to Y-125 (an 1892 edition of Nansen’s First Crossing of Greenland), a Y1-7 (Answer of the Spirit) and a Y2-14 (The Star of Bethlehem, Book 3).

Henry M. Yaple
East Wenatchee, Washington

Henry M. Yaple, chief librarian at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington., spent 11 years assembling a massive bibliography of skiing, listing every book, dissertation, film, video and piece of software published on skiing, in English, between 1890 and 2002. The two-volume work, comprising 732 pages and 7,000 items, was published by ISHA in 2004. See skiinghistory.org/research/resources/bibliographies.

Oslo by the Book

The article by Seth Masia about collecting skiing-related books (“A Dusty Passion: Books on Skiing,” November-December 2022) reminded me of one that I bought in Oslo in 1956 during my Fulbright year there. It’s a copy of J.H. W. Fulton’s 1911 book, With Ski in Norway & Lapland (Yaple No. 157). My wife, Judy, and I found that some things had changed very little, even 45 years later. As with the Fultons, husband and wife, we bought wooden skis in Oslo. We also acquired—just like the Fultons—leather lace-up ski boots and bamboo poles (or “sticks” as they called them). As in 1911, our trips out of town were by train to places like
Lillehammer where we toured either on skis or by bus up into the countryside, then skied back down. To reach Nordmarka from Christiania in 1911, Fulton describes fastening skis to the outside of light rail carriages via “a groove all along in which to put the end of the ski and straps to fasten the middle to the train.” It was exactly the same when Judy and I lived in Oslo, as this weekday photo documents. On weekends, the whole side of the car would have been covered with skis. Or, as Fulton wrote, the train would be “simply bristling with ski.” (“Ski” was used as both the singular and plural in those days.) 

Jan Harold Brunvand
Salt Lake City, Utah