Spitsbergen, the largest wilderness in Europe, is as close as you can get to the North Pole. Each year, tens of thousands of visitors experience the island's dramatic landscape with its fragile beauty - fjords, glaciers, pack-ice, midnight sun, polar bears, reindeer and a fantastic wealth of bird life. But who were the first tourists and how did they reach this uninhabited 'no-man's land'?

Greetings from Spitsbergen traces their untold story and, with the use of many unpublished photographs and postcards from the author's own collection, presents a unique insight into the 'golden era' of arctic tourism, which lasted until 1914.

John T. Reilly, Professor of Haematology at the University of Sheffield, has had a life-long interest in the arctic and its history, having undertaken expeditions to Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Spitsbergen. He has also acted as guide to several tourist cruises to Svalbard in the 1980s.