David Brower: An American Environmental Publisher

David Brower held an unrelenting passion for promoting environmental protection and publishing books to save it. During his seventeen-year tenure as Executive Director of the Sierra Club, he oversaw the production of twenty environmental coffee-table books known as the Exhibit Format series. This chapter gives first-hand accounts of David Brower, the man, the Sierra Club’s publishing programme and detailed descriptions of the publication and significance of two books from the Exhibit Format series. This Is the American Earth, the first book, created the concept for the series, and In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World was the first full-colour book in the series. The books made significant contributions to the ratification of a US environmental Bill. The success of In Wildness proved that full-colour coffee-table books were highly commercial. However, undertaking an ambitious and expensive publishing programme within a grassroots, not-for-profit environmental organisation came at a cost to the Club and Brower.