Find your wild side with ‘The Outsiders: New Outdoor Creativity’

Update: Like what you see? Publisher Gestalten recently launched an online shop where you can purchase many of the outdoor goods featured throughout ‘The Outsiders’ and other various books. We recommend checking out the simple Ursa Major Dopp Kit or the gorgeous Frescobol Carioca beach bats, along with cabin-centric ‘Hide and Seek’ and the Sandqvist Edmund Backpack.

It’s damn near impossible to deny the allure of the wild — it’s built into our human nature. However, like the natural world around us, the outdoor industry is one constantly evolving as new innovations and ideas segue from inception to fruition. The Outsiders: New Outdoor Creativity ($60), in essence, is a book chronicling that transition, the result, and the people who make it possible.

Lined with slew of beautiful photographs and first-hand accounts, the 272-page book aims to capture the ethos and outlook of those shaping the products and iconic brands spanning the outdoor industry. It’s a welcome blend of brief biography and catalog, featuring insightful and candid interviews with pivotal entrepreneurs in the field such as Patagonia marketing vice president Vincent Stanley and Poler’s Benji Wagner, along with expedition paddler Mark Kalch, custom motorcycle builder James Crowe, and others. Renowned polar explorer Kagge — the first person to reach both poles and summit Mount Everest — even wrote the book’s overreaching preface.

The peppered interviews and informative text are merely half the story, though. A variety of spectacularly vivid photographs reside throughout the hardcover book, capturing and documenting everything from the majestic beauty of the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest to the arid vastness that exemplifies the Tibetan plateau. Moreover, The Outsiders: New Outdoor Creativity showcases products from the likes of Driftwood surfboards, Topo Designs, Seattle-based Filson, the aforementioned Poler, and wealth of other remarkable companies that encapsulate the sector and provide a better means of enjoying the what lies just beyond the horizon.

Check out the main Gestalten website for more information, to make a purchase, or to peruse the publisher’s full catalog.