Une montagne symbolique et une corde cassée changent le destin d’une famille (“A symbolic mountain and a broken rope change a family’s destiny”) is an edition devoted to the first ascent of the Matterhorn and its dramatic consequences for the Taugwalder family. It reprises the account by John Heilprin and Carlo Pisani, which follows Matthias Taugwalder, a descendant of the guides of the roped party, in his search for the truth about the 1865 accident and his family’s reputation.

The book reads like a material ascent. Several papers, with varied textures and touch, evoke rock, snow and ice, while the multiple formats make each support embody a different aspect of the alpine experience. The pages, of unequal heights, overlap like strata and reveal fragments of nineteenth-century engravings, printed in halftone in a single golden ochre ink. The chapter titles, in bold Helvetica, are stacked word by word like holds on a rock face, and horizontal bars here and there pull the text taut like a rope.