Download or read book Greetings from Spitsbergen written by John T. Reilly and published by Tapir Academic Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Greetings from Spitsbergen traces their untold story and, with the use of many unpublished photographs and postcards from the author's own collection, presents a unique insight into the 'golden era' of arctic tourism, which lasted until 1914.