Do you know who Francis Sanzaro is? I think of him as a climber and climbing magazine editor, but I only recently learned that he is also an author. He has written several books. I heard him on the Climbing Beta and The Runout podcasts talking about his book The Zen of Climbing, published by Saraband in 2022. Then I learned something else about Sanzaro.

I thought The Zen of Climbing appeared to have the lasting qualities to be as influential as Arno Ilgner’s book The Rock Warriors Way. So, I went online to order a copy of Zen on Bookshop.org and found that Sanzaro had written several more books, all around philosophy, because, as I learned from his website, he has a doctorate in philosophy. Sanzaro writes, climbs, and considers our world philosophically. It wasn’t his education that surprised me, rather it was what his first love of climbing was and what his first book was all about.

The first book Sanzaro published in 2013 was titled The Boulder: A Philosophy for Bouldering. John Gill, the father of bouldering, or at least the guy that made bouldering a discipline, wrote a book its origin and history, called Bouldering & the Vertical Path in 2009. There is nothing like it on the market. There is nothing like Sanzaro’s book either. But it went the way of used books and neither title republished. Well, The Boulder went unpublished until it was grouped by Saraband with The Zen of Climbing and the The Zen of the Wild, and revised and renamed The Craft of Bouldering (2023).

The Craft of Bouldering is this form of climbing’s only piece of literature, in the grandest sense, even compared to John Gill’s Bouldering and the Vertical Path (2009). Sanzaro presents the unique place of bouldering as a subset of climbing and does so with a trained academic but also as a practitioner of the craft. Lots of sports and art forms have celebratory pieces archiving the way it’s done with excellence and milestones  as well as critiques. Bouldering’s bookshelf is short, especially after any guidebooks.

I love bouldering and have felt that it brings me unique joys. I don’t usually talk about bouldering, but reading Sanzaro’s book I realized that my feelings, approach, and interest were not weird or unique. I felt vindicated by many of his statements, such as “…every boulderer should have a problem that is a secret,” and that, “Bouldering is the art of contact.”

On rare occasions, I couldn’t always follow what he was saying. I could say the same thing about philosophy books I read for college classes, so it might just be me. Or, more precisely, I liked it, but wasn’t always sure that I understood it. I still ponder this one: “Joy must be the a priori condition of possibility in bouldering—joy that I produced by the body but in which the body captures from its movement.” It’s true, in my opinion.

Sanzaro even acknowledges that bouldering won’t matter one day; it’s young, and it didn’t matter over 100 years ago and likely won’t be a long-lived activity in the scope of human history, he predicts. Despite this or because of it, Sanzaro gives bouldering expression and a record beyond photos, videos, and guidebooks: An explanation of the craft. It’s a beautiful book and if you or someone you know is passionate about bouldering and being a boulderer, they really should read it.