HISTORY OF AVIATION **BIG SIZE**

There have been many histories of human flight, but never one like this. An unrivaled team of international writers, photographers, and artists—many of them pilots, aircraft designers, and technicians—have recorded every aspect of the most exciting technical achievement of our century in over 500 pages of highly factual narrative and full-color illustrations.

The story begins with winged gods and birdmen, surveys the centuries when the only means of flight were balloons and airships that drifted with the breeze. Then the dreams and fantasies of mankind came true, and in just seventy years, aircraft developed until even space has become the magnet for a new generation of explorers. Never has any human endeavor made such tremendous advances and enabled such delights, disasters, and discoveries within the range of man's own "three score years and ten."

History of Aviation tells a story primarily of ambition and achievement, though it does not lack its follies and failures. The story it tells has many heroes and heroines, and there will be many more in the years to come. Equally, it could never have been told but for the efforts of the unsung hundreds of thousands of people who build and fly airplanes, whether for pleasure, profit, or simply because it is their job to do so. This is their story too.

History of Aviation was edited jointly by John W. R. Taylor, FRHistS, AFRAeS, FSLAET, whose technical background includes seven years as a member of Sir Sydney Camm's design team at Hawker Aircraft Ltd. He has been Editor and Compiler of Jane's All the World's Aircraft since 1959, Consultant Editor of Air BP magazine since 1956, and is the author of 160 books on aerospace subjects.

Kenneth Munson has specialized for many years in aviation journalism and is the author of more than two dozen books. He is an Assistant Compiler of Jane's All the World's Aircraft and is the author and editor of the Pocket Encyclopedia of World Aircraft in Color series.

The History of the Motor Car is a real milestone in the literature of this fascinating subject. The text is admirable, carefully researched, authoritative, clear, and immensely readable, covering this major theme in a comprehensive yet not over-technical way. The lavish and carefully assembled illustrations are superb, with over 700 of them, nearly 500 of which are in full color.

This unique book tells the whole story of the car, from the first hesitant experiments with steam and wind-driven machines right through to the streamlined supercars of today. It includes absorbing sections on the great inventors and makers, showing the weight of human thought and endeavor that lies behind the machines we now so unthinkingly accept; on the excitements of historic road races; on the famous circuits of the past and present; on the Grand Prix monsters; on the courageous, extraordinary, and even heroic exploits of the motoring pioneers; on the founding of the great industrial giants; and on many other aspects of this wide theme in which so many people are deeply interested, as the motor car has an immense effect on fashion, social history, politics, travel, and war.

All the significant names in the evolving world of the motor car appear in these pages; the greatest have a ring of both history and romance—Darracq and Daimler, Benz, Bentley and Bugatti, Lanchester, Rolls-Royce, Hispano-Suiza, De Dion, Citroën, Fiat, Ford, and so many others; the whole absorbing history being vividly illuminated by its great wealth of splendid and evocative pictures.

Source : publisher's summary printed on the cover