Airshipwreck by Deighton. Len, & Schwartzman. Arnold,

Hard back book with colour pictorial dust jacket, 73 pages, illustrayes with B/W plates and drawings, glossary of technical terms.

The age of the commercial airship was short-lived -scarcely more than a quarter of a century. In that time, the incidence of disastrous failure was high. 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 never published before, he bears witness to the magic of those gentle, awesome giants of the sky - 'cathedral arches twisted into a tracery of aluminium'.