Publishers decide that fellsman Wainwright is past his sell-by date

There was always something rather old-fashioned about Alfred Wainwright. Even in his prime he seemed like a creature from a different era, a Victorian gentleman perhaps. But time has finally caught up with him.

Over the years Wainwright – known to his fans as AW – sold more than two million copies of his quaint pen-and-ink guide-books to the Lake District and other northern fells. But Penguin Books, which has published them under the Michael Joseph imprint, has decided to drop them from its list. Declining sales, said Penguin's managing director, Helen Fraser, had meant that 40 of Wainwright's original titles were already out of print. But now the final nine are to be dropped too.

Wainwright died in 1991, aged 84. Most of his life had been lived in obscurity. From Monday to Friday he worked as a local government officer; at the weekends he tramped the hills of his beloved north country, usually alone. But by the time his ashes came to be scattered on his favourite mountain overlooking Buttermere, he had become something of a cult hero.

Until, aged 80, he got his own BBC2 TV series, all of his fame had been built by word-of-mouth praise for his meticulous little guidebooks. For three dec-ades he turned down personal appearances and signing sessions and refused to give talks or attend exhibitions about his work. All requests for press, radio and television interviews were rejected and he forbade his publisher from giving out his address or personal details to anyone.

And yet the charm of his little books with their Indian ink line-drawings, route-guides and sketch maps, their wry commentaries and sly digs at the modern world, had entranced generations of walkers. His unflinching determination to avoid all things modern – even the text was printed from his immaculate handwriting – seemed to harken after the past. He evoked a golden age of clean-aired escape from black industrial townscapes up there on the fells, halfway between Halifax and heaven.

There was something simultaneously rough and romantic about him, in an archetypal Northern way. Born in 1907 in Blackburn, the son of a drunkard stonemason, he was brought up by a devout Christian mother who stuck to her hopeless husband and passed on to her children her obsession with neatness. At the age of 13 Alfred became an office boy at the Town Hall, where he filled enormous leather-bound ledgers with rows of tiny figures in exquisite copper-plate hand. He was to work his way up to become borough treasurer, first in Blackburn and then, as his love of the Lakes turned to a passion, in Kendal.

He had not begun rambling until he was 23. Then one day in 1930, with a cousin, he caught the bus to Windermere and climbed to the top of Orrest Head. It changed his life.

He was by then married, to a mill-girl. From the outset the marriage was loveless. Ruth later revealed that she would never have married him if she had known he had red hair. While courting he had kept his cap rammed down on his head and she discovered the awful truth only on their wedding night. After his death an autobiographical fragment by Wainwright turned up in his papers in which he disclosed that when his wife "submitted sullenly" to his demands she made him feel like a beast. His weekend forays to the fells were to tire himself out so that, "flogged into weariness by excessive effort", his sex drive was sublimated.

Yet despite his grim motivation, the fell-tops and valleys of the Lakes – and later the Dales, Pennines, Wales and Scotland – became the unrivalled source of pleasure in his life. Every Saturday he would set out, with just his shaving things in the pockets of his third-best tweed suit, to clamber up to the summits in collar and tie.

Back home, during the long evenings, he would shut himself in his study to meticulously chronicle his weekend escapes in his perfectionist hand. When he had tramped all 214 fells in the Lake District several times – travelling, as he was to do all his life, only by bus – he had 2,000 copies of his first book printed at his own expense and took copies around shops to sell.

As his reputation grew, so did reports of his irascibility. People called him a curmudgeon, and said he didn't just prefer the country to the town, but that he liked animals better than people. (By his death, his biographer, Hunter Davies, estimates he had given away almost £1m, mainly to the Animal Rescue home for stray cats and dogs near his Kendal home). "Walking alone is poetry; walking in a group only prose," he once wrote. Up on the moors, when readers recognised him he would walk off a few yards and pretend to have a pee – an activity which brooks no interruption. And if the strangers lingered he would deny who he was, maintaining he was not A Wainwright but A Walker.

In 1985, when his book sales were about to top the one million mark, his publishers talked him into marking the sale of the millionth copy by giving the buyer a modest prize which included dinner with AW. He agreed, but later, realising what he had done – "I'll have to eat with a stranger," he said, horrified – he made the publisher drive him to Manchester where he bought the book back. But time made him less of a loner, perhaps because he realised the more money he made the more he could give to animals. Towards the end he eventually agreed to appear on Desert Island Discs, although he said he did so only to discover whether Sue Lawley's legs were as good as was reported – and he insisted she came to Manchester to record it. It was as far south as he was prepared to go.

In the end it was his eyesight that went. "Now I live in a shroud of mist," he wrote in his last book. "The world has lost its detail. But in the gathering gloom there is great comfort in closing my eyes and seeing clearly a host of memories, evergreen still, of beauties and wonders of my beloved country."

For his many fans those memories will linger too. Millions will long cherish his little books, but there are today not enough new readers who want to share the dream. It is finally the end of an era – an era of sodden tweeds and darned woolly socks, of thermoses and Kendal mint cake, of hand-knitted bobble hats and municipal socialism. We shall not see their like again.