AIRSHIPWRECK.**

JONATHAN CAPE (LONDON),1978.UK,landscape,slim 8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn. FINE+/FINE.No owner inscrptn and no price-clip to dw/dj - publisher's adhesive price lable still in situ.Bright,crisp,clean,glossy laminated, wrap-around colour photographic illustrated dw/dj with capitalised, black-lettered authors' names+title; with negligible shelf-wear or creasing to edges and corners - no nicks,tears or splits present - and unusually,no sunning/fading to a bright,sharp-coloured spine/backstrip.Top+fore-edges bright and clean; contents bright,tight,clean solid and sound - pristine - no dog-ear reading creases to any pages' corner tips,appears unread - apart from my own collation.Publisher's bright,crisp,clean,sharp-cornered, original plain black cloth boards; front board with bright,crisp,blocked silver gilt capitalised letters (title+ author's names) within circular border which also has a silver gilt silhouette of dirigible/zeppelin in it's centre; bright,crisp,blocked silver gilt letters to spine/backstrip also,and immaculate repeated b/w detailed side elevation plan of the Hindenburg illustrated endpapers.UK, landscape,slim 8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn thus,3-72pp [paginated] includes an introduction, accounts of airship disasters covering 1890s to 1930s, profuse contemporary b/w photographs interspersed throughout the text and the book, acknowledgements at rear - as last paginated page; plus [unpaginated] b/w photographic illustrated title page with world map of principal wreck/disaster sites to its reverse and a b/w illustrated visual glossary of technical terms as last unpaginated page. Visually the exterior appearance is exceptional,and even internally,the book is also in an exceptional condition/state of preservation and presentation for a book of its 45-year-old-age. It really is an exceptional, exemplary example for its completeness,cleanliness and brightness and virtually fault-free. The short-lived age of the between-the-wars - scarcely more than a quarter of a century - commercial airships.An engaging narrative questions why this happened as it examines the fate of individual airships in turn.
Although comparatively few fare-paying passengers lost their lives in airship wrecks, fatalities among the machines out-number the airships that survived to pass into honourable retirement.Yet Len Deighton calls the airship one of the greatest triumphs of structural engineering the world has seen.
Through this remarkable collection of photographs, many of them previously unpublished,he bears witness to the magic of those gentle,awesome giants of the sky - 'cathedral arches twisted into a tracery of aluminium' - whilst also portraying the disastrous consequences when things went wrong.
No more than forty years ago,(then 1978),just two years before WW2 and the demise of the airship,the only regular passenger flights between Europe and North America or Brazil were by luxuriously appointed and noiseless airships, sauntering gracefully at low enough altitude for navigation by road maps.Even as early as 1912,passengers could relax in their wicker armchairs on the carpeted flight deck after an excellent cold lunch aboard the postal delivery Zeppelin and watch the German countryside unroll beneath them at a steady 45 mph.That,in turn,was but fifteen years after a Berlin clergyman had made the first-ever manned and motor propelled balloon flight.
So,where did the dream go wrong? One answer was provided by C. G. Grey,who wrote in 1926 that 'airships breed like elephants and aeroplanes like rabbits'.If that is less than a complete explanation,the allusion is not without its apt tone of comic absurdity.Consider the tale of the captain of the L6,blown off course in a gale as darkness fell,holding conversation with his supposed rescuer on the ground below,and discovering that he was talking to his own petty officer who had tumbled unnoticed out of the airship's flight gondola.Or the family who found their isolated house dwarfed by the skeletal remains of a giant beast which had quietly died in the night.
There were,of course,those who perished painfully in their enthusiasm for airships.Yet no morbid or mournful note is struck in the astonishing story of simple pioneering faith which Len Deighton unfolds. Nothing is so apparent in his pictures as the air of gaiety and festival that often attended scenes of rescue and salvage.Superficially it might seem that airships were a folly,a passing fad,a brief interval between centuries of slow,muscle-bound,earthly travel and the age of rockets in space. That would be to overlook the mystique of the airship,enshrined in this book as a sort of divine catalyst,a spark burning bright and extinguished in an instant,having enabled men to cross a threshold and move out to the far reaches of the universe.
Want more Len DEIGHTON books/titles? Please search my MODERN FIRSTS,MODERN FIRSTS2,GENERAL,and NAVAL/MILITARY catalogues for other and similar available titles.
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