It's taken a long time to get to where this project is today, but the limited posts I made on Facebook last week brought so much love and positivity for the project that yes; now is the time to go public and get the message out to a wider audience.
Let me explain...
In November 2009 I met up with Graham Hoey in the café at the Outside in Hathersage. Graham was in possession of the new route books that resided in the Lovers' Leap café in Stoney Middleton, and he'd had been thinking about making the books available to a wider audience.
I had recently moved back to Sheffield and was looking for a climbing-based project to get to grips with and publishing the books online seemed a great fit, so I designed a simple web site and we were away!
I followed this up by collecting together a number of books from different locations; each one being returned to the owner once it had been scanned. The results were all put online for people to access freely, and the site became increasingly popular.
Then I came across a web site - purely by chance - that had ripped off thousands of the scanned images, and was basically getting free content with very little intellectual effort (although it must have taken a lot of effort to download each individual image!)
At that point, the RockArchivist web site closed down, and I began to think about how else we could deliver the content to an appreciative audience. After a few years, and a lot of head scratching, this is where we are today, releasing the whole collection of new route books in physical form; as books that you can buy, browse, flick through, use for research, annotate yourself and basically giggle over a heck of a lot of testosterone-fuelled bravado.
I sincerely hope everyone embraces this project and enjoys the results. Perhaps the best thing about it though it is now also a vehicle for raising money for good causes, and that can't be at all bad now, can it?
Phil Kelly, August 2023