AT Guides Lead Back Decades Down The Trail

On Thursday I received in the mail a special Appalachian Trail (AT) item...a Georgia-North Carolina First Edition Guide. I started collecting old guides back in the Spring which I wrote about here.

The actual name is Guide to the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smokies, the Nantahalas and Georgia and this book was published in 1963 making it almost six decades old. It supplanted my AT Guide in Tennessee and North Carolina, Second Edition as the oldest book I had obtained.

GA-NC 1st Edition

Still, the Tennessee-North Carolina one is special to me as it is from the same year I was born in 1967 and in my home area. It is the first section I started to collect the guides from. I am only three short of having them all. The main one I don't have is a first edition (the others are six & seven). I even took an old wooden hatbox, put an AT sign that comes from the Roans circa 1990 (not saying how I got it), and a sticker on top to store those books. It came out really nice.   

TN-NC 2nd Edition

The hatbox that I converted to hold my TN-NC Guides

TN-NC Maps

GA-NC Maps

They have been my number one focus, but I have also been slowly collecting the Georgia-North Carolina ones. I have a 4th, 5th, 10th, 11th, and the one I used old numbe 14. I love a lot of things in this book because a historian is a part of who I am, but I have to admit the maps are extra special. What can I say I am a map guy. Anyway, hopefully at some point I can report I got a Tennessee-North Carolina first edition.