Greetings from Spitsbergen: Tourists at the Eternal Ice, 1827-1914

Spitsbergen, the largest wilderness in Europe, is as close as you can get to the North Pole. Each year, tens of thousands of visitors experience the island's dramatic landscape with its fragile beauty, including fjords, glaciers, pack-ice, the midnight sun, polar bears, reindeer, and a fantastic abundance of bird life. But who were the first tourists and how did they reach this uninhabited 'no-man's land?' Greetings from Spitsbergen traces their untold story and, with the use of many unpublished photographs and postcards from the author's own collection, presents a unique insight into the 'golden era' of arctic tourism, which lasted until 1914.