VITTORIO SELLA. South Wall of Baltoro Glacier, 1909, Sella number HK 185. 20.9x16.5" gelatin silver print, printed c. 1909, mounted on 14x18" heavy gray board. Embossed with Vittorio Sella stamp in lower right of print. Inscribed in pencil on mount verso: 185 South Wall of Baltoro Glacier / HK 185 / cut & make / 4 1/2. Inscribed in black ink mount verso: South Wall of Baltoro Glacier / Karakoram Mtns / Himalayan peaks in Cashmere.

The Baltoro Glacier, 39 miles in length, is the world's second longest non-polar glacier in the Shigar district Gilgit-Baltistan of Northern Pakistan. The Baltoro Muztagh lies to the south and east of the Glacier and the Masherbrum Mountains lie to the south. Paiju Peak 6610 m 21,686 north side of the Baltoro Glacier and western of Baltoro Muztagh

According to Charles Fay, writing in the 1893 AMC Bulletin, Vittorio Sella was born in the Piedmont Region of Biella, northern Italy in 1859, in sight of the outliers of the Alps. His father, Venanzio Guiseppe Sella, was a woolen manufacturer who ran textile mills called Lanificio Maurzio Sella, which had been in the family for hundreds of years. The son seems to have inherited his father's versatility, for Venanzio Sella not only authored a standard work on woolen manufacture, but also published a treatise in 1856 on the then-new art of photography, which was translated into German and French and incorporated in Roret's Encyclopedic.

Sella's uncle, Quintino Sella, was a famous Italian minister of finance and founder of the Italian Alpine Club. It was he who taught the boy to love the mountains by taking the fifteen-year-old Sella on his first ascent in 1874, followed by another a year later.

This sale of lots from this auction will directly benefit the Appalachian Mountain Club Trails Protection Fund; Conservation Research and Climate Action; and the Modernization and Preservation of the AMC Library and Archives.

Good: Moderate wear, abrasions, mount is fragile and has corners and pieces missing and mount verso has tape residue.