Hindenburg - An illustrated History
Reliving the Era of the Great Airships
Archbold, Rick (Text) - Marschall, Ken (Paintings)
First edition.
Excellently designed, fine book about the biggest of all great airships.
"It is burning, bursting into flames...this is terrible... Oh, the humanity...!"
A radio reporter's account of the giant Hindenburg crashing to the ground in flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey, remains one of the most famous broadcasts ever made. The Hindenburg was truly a flying luxury liner, and her spectacular destruction on May 6, 1937, marked the end of the great era of airship travel.
Now, in one splendidly illustrated volume, the complete story of Germany's mammoth airship and the other silver giants that once crossed the skies is told as never before. Dozens of paintings, diagrams, black-and-white and color photographs - many of them previously unpublished -convey just what it was like to make a voyage on the largest aircraft ever constructed. In a spectacular three-page fold-out, readers can explore the Hindenburg's passenger decks, from the lounge with its grand piano and the promenades with their panoramic views to the elegant dining room and the airtight smoking room. Ken Marschalls evocative paintings depict some of the great moments in the history of Zeppelins up to the fiery disaster that brought the airship era to an untimely end.
HINDENBURG: An Illustrated History chronicles the complete story of the great dirigibles - from the pioneering efforts of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin to the brief career of die Hindenburg's little-known sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin II. At the turn of the Century Zeppelins established the world's first passenger-carrying airline. But World War I bombing raids over London earned them the label "baby-killers." In the postwar years Great Britain and the United States competed with Germany for the prestige of building the world's most advanced airship. The British envisioned an empire linked by a fleet of silver giants. For the United States Navy, the Zeppelin would be a flying aircraft carrier, transporting fighter planes in its belly.
By the late 1920s it seemed that the airship was poised to conquer the skies. In 1926 explorer Roald Amundsen flew across the Arctic Ocean in the dirigible Norge. An ecstatic New York ticker-tape parade greeted the Graf Zeppelin at the end of her pioneering 1929 round-the-world flight. The Graf soon went on to establish the first ever nonstop transatlantic air Service.
But not all airship enterprises ended in triumph. Two years after the Norge's Arctic exploit, the Italia crashed on a polar ice floe, stranding her surviving crew for forty-nine days. And the first intercontinental flight of die British airship R101 ended in flames in a French field. The U.S. Navy airships Akron and Macon were wrecked by storms at sea within two years of each other. A haunting photo mosaic shows the site where underwater cameras recently located the skeleton of the huge dirigible Macon on the ocean floor, lying with the Sparrowhawk fighters that were once housed in her internal hangar.
HINDENBURG: An Illustrated History vividly recreates a time when many believed that lighter-than-air craft held the promise of the future. Highlighted by a highly readable, informative text and illustrated with hundreds of breathtaking images, this magnificent book brings to life a remarkable chapter in the history of flight.
Hardcover with dust jacket, large format
229 Seiten / pages
many illustrations and photos
very good condition
London - 1994 - The Orion & Publishing Group Ltd
Art.Nr. 19080
