Sierra Club Books was the publishing division, for both adults and children, of the Sierra Club, founded in by then club President David Brower. They were a United States publishing company located in San Francisco, California with a concentration on biological conservation. In the adult division of the organization was sold to Counterpoint LLC and the children's books division to Gibbs Smith. History The Sierra Club started its book program in , when David Brower, an editor with the University of California Press, became the club's executive director. In , they published the first of its climbers’ and hikers’ guides. In , when the Sierra Club Books began, they published the ‘Exhibit Format Book Series’, a collection of nature photography and in they published their first color volume, Elliot Porter's In Wilderness Is the Preservation of the World. Volumes intended for club members had been published prior to . In addition, books under their name had been published before , but done through already established publishers, as was the case with This Is Dinosaur, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Their first in-house book, volume 1 in the Exhibit Format series, was This is the American Earth, published in . In , they introduced color photography to the series with the publication of In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World with photographs by Eliot Porter and Island In Time: The Point Reyes Peninsula with photographs by Philip Hyde. The series won the Carey–Thomas Award for creative publishing, by Publishers Weekly. Fifty thousand copies were sold in the first four years, and by sales exceeded . The books were successful in introducing the public to wilderness preservation and to the Sierra Club. Paperback reprints of many of the Exhibit Format books were published by Ballantine Books. After Brower left the Club in , the club came under the leadership of Jon Beckmann from to . During Beckmann's tenure the program expanded and diversified considerably, publishing books by established and emerging writers such as Wendell Berry, Robert Bly, Galen Rowell, and David Rains Wallace as well as field guides, fiction, poetry, and books on environmental activism, such as the Sierra Club Battlebooks. Many Sierra Club books were produced by the Yolla Bolly Press run by Jim and Carolyn Robertson in Covelo, California. The program continued for two decades after , first under Peter Beren, the former marketing director, then under Helen Sweetland,