Guides to Lake District rescued from wilderness

Alfred Wainwright's celebrated guides to the Lake District, which were dropped by their publishers last month after 50 years in print, are to be saved from the scrapheap.

Since Wainwright – known as AW to his legions of followers – published his first "love letter" to the Eastern Fells in 1955, his 49 books have sold more than two million copies.

Now the hand-written and painstakingly illustrated guides are to return to their spiritual home in Kendal, Cumbria.

The publisher Michael Joseph, part of the Penguin Group, announced last month in a letter to the original publisher,The Westmorland Gazette, that it would stop producing the pen-and-ink guides.

Yesterday, John Nicoll, the managing director of Frances Lincoln Publishers, said his firm would publish the guides and return the printing to Kendal in accordance with the author's original wishes. "We are really thrilled to be publishing these books, which I have known all my life," Mr Nicoll said.

"As a boy who was born and brought up at the foot at Kentmere in the heart of the Lake District, I remember treasuring each new volume as it was published. Now I am honoured to be the publisher of these extraordinary books and look forward to introducing them to a whole new generation," he added. Wainwright's widow, Betty, added: "I am delighted that the new publisher has local connections and I'm sure AW would have been very pleased."

Her husband took to rambling at the age of 23 after a holiday to the Lake District from his home in Blackburn, Lancashire. He qualified as an accountant and moved to Kendal in 1941, spending all his spare time on the fells nearby.

In the introduction to his first meticulous guide, he wrote: "This book is one man's way of expressing his devotion to Lakeland's friendly hills. It was conceived, and is born, after many years of inarticulate worshipping at their shrines. It is, in very truth, a love letter."

He spent 13 years writing and illustrating the seven Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells before going on to devise the coast-to-coast walk and write guides on Scotland, the Pennine Way and his bestselling book, Fellwalking with Wainwright.

Eric Robson, the chairman of the Wainwright Society and presenter of BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time, said: "He communicated, better than any guide book writer before or since, the essence of the Lakeland landscape."