The discovery of the body of lost explorer George Mallory brings this popular nonfiction topic to new heights

This past March, Larry Johnson, former marketing director of Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, Pa., seemed to have vanished into thin air.And in a way he had: Johnson quit his job to climb Mt. Everest as the coordinator of the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition. Just a few months before, 52-year-old amateur climber Johnson, who had never been out of the country before, had created the expedition, lining up sponsorship and a crack professional climbing team, after he got all fired up about his favorite mountaineering mystery during online chats with German student Jochen Hemmleb on an Everest Web site.

On May 1 that mystery was solved as the expedition made headlines with its discovery, at the altitude of 27,000 feet, of the body of George Mallory, the 38-year-old British schoolteacher who, with student companion Andrew Irvine, disappeared during their Everest expedition in 1924. Mountaineer buffs have long believed that Mallory -- who uttered the famous line "because it is there" in response to a question about why he wanted to climb Everest -- reached the summit of the 29,028-foot-high mountain before he died, some 29 years before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

Johnson and Hemmleb are already set to tell the story in Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory and Irvine, a book that will include expedition photos. The title was signed up by Mountaineers Books, Seattle, Wash., this past January without any surety that a discovery would be made. Now that it has, editor and editor-in-chief Margaret Foster is moving up the planned August 2000 book to this October. The publisher is also fielding a lot of foreign rights offers for the book, an interest that was stoked on the last day of BookExpo America, as news of the discovery started to trickle in. As for dramatic rights, there's already a deal in place; with sponsors BBC and Nova, who have a documentary in the works.

But Johnson's jump on the story was short-lived; the Mallory discovery appears to be prompting another Everest book frenzy justfrenzyjust as other tragic climbers' deaths, immortalized in Into Thin Air and other accounts, created a flurry of Everest books two years ago.

Less than a week after the discovery, National Geographic Books announced an accelerated publication, also to October, of David Breashears and Audrey Salkeld's The Last Climb: The Legendary Everest Expeditions of George Mallory. National Geographic Books director Kevin Mulroy told PW that the book was in the works months before the newsbreak as a planned followup to climbing expert and filmmaker Breashears's 1997 bestseller Everest: Mountain Without Mercy.

While Johnson, in his book deal, had arranged for the use of expedition photographs in his upcoming book, it was on a nonexclusive basis. Breashears, who served as adviser to expedition sponsors Nova and BBC and their film crew, will also include the now extra-hot 1999 expedition photographs in his book as well as the archival ones previously planned.

Also soon to come is another Mallory book, to be written by anthropologist Wade Davis and published by Knopf. The publisher, which has already had success with the saga of another adventurous yet tragic explorer, Ernest Shackleton, signed up the book, luckily as it turns out, just before the Everest newsbreak. The still untitled tome is tentatively scheduled for a June 2000 release.

But S&S is currently getting the most out of the renewed Everest interest. The publisher had the good fortune to release Breashears's autobiography, High Exposure: An Enduring Passion for Everest and Unforgiving Places, now a bestseller, just as he was being called upon to comment on the Mallory discovery.

"I'd like to say I planned this," joked S&S publisher David Rosenthal. "But even I couldn't arrange this."

For Johnson, the expedition he arranged is by no means tarnished either by his having to return home mere days before the discovery (because of a possibly infectious chest cold) or -- as it now turns out -- by the race by others to produce competing books. "It's all been a dream come true," he said. "For me, I've reached my Everest summit."