GRANITE PEAK PUBLICATIONS: Accompanying travelers to the national park since 2002

All posts tagged Yellowstone

Keep calm and read on with IPG’s book sale

Categories: News, On the Web, Trip planning
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IPG Book Sale through May Update May 15, 2020: Today is the official print publication date of the Yellowstone Treasures, updated sixth edition! Because IPG has extended this sale I announced in April through the end of May, you can get the 30% discount off a brand-new book! Enjoy.

We sympathize with what you’re going through, whether you’re sheltering in place or working at an essential job in these risky times. So we’re happy to report that our distributor, Independent Publishers Group, has a 30% off sale on all orders via their website through April 2020. Use the code KEEPCALMANDREADON to get the discount on any of our books on IPG’s store as well as their wide selection, from children’s activities to cookbooks to escapist fiction. IPG supplies you with print or e-books, whichever you prefer.

Our books [link to IPG’s store] work as escapist armchair travel, but with a practical bent, since you can apply what you learn to a future trip. Become the tour guide for your family or other group! As Janet Jones, the cover photographer for the new edition of Yellowstone Treasures wrote me recently:

Yellowstone Treasures is a great way to virtually visit the place Yellowstone fans love.

Sixth edition e-book birthday!

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Yellowstone Treasures cover 2020 Today the latest digital version of our popular guidebook was released! During July-December 2019 our team worked on updating the geyser basin, trail, and road descriptions, creating a new introduction and geological time line, revising the geology chapter, and researching new photos. The book’s cover is graced with a photo of Old Faithful Geyser by photographer and naturalist Janet Jones of Snow Moon Ink. Explore America’s first national park from your armchair with Yellowstone Treasures! See the guidebook page for more.

See our new E-book page to buy! You can get the new book in Kindle, ePub, or PDF formats for a variety of e-readers. If you’d rather borrow the book, you can ask your library to acquire this new version. (The ePub ISBN is 9781733103213.)

The print book will ship on May 15, but you can preorder it now, such as via Bookshop, a new online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community. Buy local, indie first! Or see other places to buy the print version.

Yellowstone Treasures named finalist in two book award contests

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Big news! On March 14, 2018, the Independent Book Publishers Association announced that Yellowstone Treasures: The Traveler’s Companion to the National Park, updated fifth edition (2017) is a finalist in the 30th annual IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards in the travel category. This is a true honor, since finalist status with IBPA means the book will receive either a Gold or a Silver medal. The IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards recognize excellence in book editorial and design in 55 categories. See this year’s finalists on the IBPA Book Awards page.

Then on March 20 we learned that the popular guidebook has been recognized as a finalist in the 20th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, too! The Foreword Reviews editorial team selected their finalists from more than 2,000 individual titles spread across 65 genres. The complete list of finalists for the Foreword INDIES awards can be found at: https://www.forewordreviews.com/awards/finalists/2017/. Winners are now being decided by a panel of judges across the country, reflecting Foreword’s readership of booksellers and librarians.

We’re glad the new cover, 65 new color photos, and updates to the geyser and wildlife viewing information have captured both IBPA’s and Foreword’s attention again this year.

Stay tuned. Winners of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards will be announced during Publishing University in Austin, Texas, on April 6, 2018; the Foreword INDIES winners will be announced on June 15, 2018.

Read the full news release in the media kit or learn about our books’ previous awards.

—Editor and publisher, Beth Chapple

An author tour for Through Early Yellowstone

Categories: Bio, News, Through Early Yellowstone
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Janet Chapple lecture BBCW

The author/editor at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming

This fall Janet has been taking the new historical anthology on the road, explaining her research and discovery of the stories and artwork in Through Early Yellowstone: Adventuring by Bicycle, Covered Wagon, Foot, Horseback, and Skis. On September 9, 2016, she was invited to present a slideshow at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. Her title, “A Love Affair with Yellowstone National Park,” allowed her to tell the story of her early childhood in the park, her repeated visits, and her research and writing about Yellowstone over the years.

Tidbits of her biography are told elsewhere, such as on the About Us page and in an article called “Celebrating an Old Faithful Area Seventieth Anniversary,” published in August 2009 in The Geyser Gazer Sput (see “Janet Celebrates Her 75th Anniversary in the Park” for some fun stories). But in this lecture she also explained a lot about her research that led to the anthology and the beautiful centerpiece of watercolors.

In her own words:

I spent about a decade reading everything I could get my hands on in libraries on both coasts and at the University of Wyoming library and the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center Library on the northern border of the park. I found that tens of thousands of documents have been preserved. Writers about the Yellowstone area and then the new national park included explorers and adventurers, government expedition members, geologists, artists, park employees, army and administrative personnel, tourists, journalists, and lecturers, all of them thrilled with the wonders they had found.

Buffalo Bill Center of the West poster

The Center of the West lobby with lecture poster

After reading about 250 of these, she, with my help, finally settled on eleven major accounts, many of them illustrated with engravings. These were mostly magazine articles published during 1871-1916, with a few chapters from books. You’ll find the table of contents here, if you are curious and don’t own the book yet.

Back to the story. Here she describes her big find, the watercolors from 1884.

While researching in the Yellowstone Heritage Library, I came across correspondence between Park Historian Lee Whittlesey and a geologist named Alan Channing from Cardiff University, Wales. Channing had done some research in Yellowstone and had become fascinated with the park. Knowing that Thomas H. Thomas, one of my favorite early Yellowstone authors, came from Cardiff, and wondering about the source of the engravings of his Yellowstone scenes, I got in touch with Dr. Channing. He told me that Thomas’s original sketchbook and notebooks were held in the archives of the National Museum of Wales. Then, in 2008 I got to travel to Wales and see the Thomas watercolor sketches in the archives of their museum.

Janet gave substantially the same talk this week at the Bill Lane Center for the West at Stanford University in California. There she regaled the audience with tales while they munched on a lunch that Stanford provided. She has not booked her next event yet, but you are welcome to contact her to suggest one!

–Editor and Publisher, Beth Chapple

From the Desk of Janet Chapple

Categories: Bio, Janet Chapple's Other Writing, On the Web
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Personal Essay for University of Nebraska Press’s #FindYourPark Series

Old Faithful Inn interior

Old Faithful Inn interior, showing the great fireplace and balconies

At the invitation of the publisher of the travelogue by Jules Leclercq that I translated with my colleague Suzanne Cane, Yellowstone, Land of Wonders, I’ve recently written about my personal connection with Yellowstone National Park for their website.

Reflecting a lifetime association with the park—or, at least, a strong association during some of my very early years and then again since the age of sixty—I’ve written about my early memories of being there and why Yellowstone means so much to me that I continue to research and write about it during years when I might be taking it easy.

I hope my blog readers might be inspired to reward themselves with repeated visits to this richly fascinating and incomparable national treasure.

Photo credit: The image of the Old Faithful Inn fireplace from Bat’s Alley is an NPS photo.