Robert W Service

When Robert W. Service was transferred to the Whitehorse Branch of the Canadian Bank of Commerce in the Yukon Territory in 1904, six years after the Klondike Gold Rush, his career as a world-famous poet would soon begin. Inspired by the beauty of the Yukon wilderness, Service would write some of the most expressive poetry of the age depicting the trials and tribulations of the Yukon gold mining life. "Best Tales of the Yukon" collects together forty-seven...

Songs of a Sourdough by Robert Service, defined a place and time like only a truly great poet can. Set in the Yukon during the great Klondike gold rush, this collection of poems is full of the wild characters, the freezing snow storms and the vast staggering beauty Artic wilderness. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing...

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun," declared Robert Service as he related the fulfillment of a dying prospector's request. "The Cremation of Sam McGee" was based on one of many peculiar tales he heard upon his 1904 arrival in the Canadian frontier town of Whitehorse. Less than a decade after the Klondike gold rush, many natives and transplants remained to tell stories of the boom towns that sprang up with the sudden influx of miners,...

The Cold War had seemed like a permanent fixture in global politics, and until its denouement, no Western or Soviet politician had foreseen that an epoch defined by games of irreconcilable one-upmanship between the world's most heavily armed superpowers would end in their lifetimes. Under the long, forbidding shadow of the Cold War, even the smallest miscalculation from either side could result in catastrophe. Everything changed in March 1985, when...