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First U.S. Edition, 1997. Hardcover in blue cloth with gilt spine lettering and Paladwr device, in the original pictorial dust jacket. xiv, 572 pp., extensively illustrated with historical photographs, route maps, charts, and airline genealogies; bibliography and index. The copyright page states that the work was first published in Great Britain in 1997 by Putnam Aeronautical Books and that this edition was published and distributed in the United States and Canada by Paladwr Press. Contemporary listings likewise identify the Paladwr issue as the First U.S. Edition, produced in the same year as the Putnam British first edition.
An unusually substantial history of Asian commercial aviation, covering the development of airlines from the pioneering services of the 1920s through the jet age. Davies organizes the book geographically and historically across forty chapters, including Imperial and postwar India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Hong Kong and Macao, the Philippines, China, Japan, Korea and Mongolia. The numerous hand-drawn route maps are particularly useful, documenting changing networks such as Merpati Nusantara in 1977, successive Chinese airline systems, and Japan Air Lines' international network. The Smithsonian Libraries catalogue the work specifically under both commercial aeronautics history and airline history.
Like New / Near Fine dust jacket. The book itself is exceptionally fresh: blue cloth clean and bright, gilt crisp, binding square and tight, and pages clean and unmarked, with virtually no evidence of use observed. The original dust jacket is Near Fine, bright and complete, with only very slight handling/edge wear and a small amount of creasing at the spine ends. Jacket is unclipped with the original $65 price. An especially attractive copy of a fairly hefty aviation reference work.
R. E. G. (Ronald Edward George) Davies was particularly well positioned to produce this book: by the time it appeared he had spent decades researching commercial aviation and had served since 1983 as Air Transport Curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Google Books describes Airlines of Asia as the third installment following his histories of U.S. and Latin American airlines, and the book's research reportedly involved travel throughout much of Asia and interviews with people involved in operating its airlines.
There is also a nice visual-authorship detail here. Many of the maps are signed "REGD": Davies wasn't simply compiling text around commercially supplied graphics; his own hand-drawn maps form part of the book's historical documentation. The jacket takes a different approach. Its rear flap explicitly credits the cover illustration to Anthony Cowland, describing his original painting as a Boeing 777 of China Southern Airlines on final approach to runway 13 at Hong Kong. That image is especially evocative because Davies' foreword discusses the famously demanding approach to Hong Kong's then-current Kai Tak airport while anticipating its replacement by the new Chek Lap Kok airport. The jacket therefore captures the aviation world at almost exactly the moment documented by the book.
Seller Inventory # NF.DAV.1997.1
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