In 1937 Chatto & Windus published The Night Climbers of Cambridge, written by Noël Edward Symington under the alias Whipplesnaith, about the climbers who scaled the walls, roofs and spires of the Cambridge colleges after dark. Symington and his accomplices took photographs of themselves in action, with cameras and lighting that sometimes alerted the police, a staged photography of the kind common in the press of the time. Contemporary artist Thomas Mailaender, who acquired the climbers' archive, reworks the pictures, and Ian Jeffrey's essay reads the night-climber as a wary prototype crossing a chancy terrain with few rules.