British Airways, An Airline and its Aircraft, Volume 1, 1919–1939: The Imperial Years by R.E.G. Davies. Paladwr Press, McLean VA. $35.00. 2006.
People of my generation could buy every aviation book published without going broke. The field was small and the output modest — you could keep up. Today thousands of books pour from the presses every year, and the serious reader must choose carefully. The economics of aviation publishing, and the economics of the reader's shelf space and wallet, demand discrimination.
Aviation books have also changed in character. Where we once had broad, sweeping treatments of the whole canvas — Assen Jordanoff's Through the Overcast comes to mind, a book that tried to explain everything about flying to everyone who wanted to understand it — we now have works of extraordinary specialization. The post-World War II trickle was led by the Harleyford series out of Great Britain, volumes that set a new standard for the illustrated aviation monograph. From that trickle has grown a tumultuous stream, and from that stream the challenge of selection.
Which makes it all the more welcome when a book comes along that answers the challenge definitively. R.E.G. Davies is the dean of air transport writers, and that is the least interesting thing about him. He is also a novelist, a jazz expert, a football (soccer) connoisseur, an expert in marquetry, and one of the most fascinating speakers in a field not notably short of colorful personalities. When Davies sits down to write about the history of air transport, the result is inevitably something more than history.
For this volume, Davies does the maps for which he is well-known throughout the aviation community — clear, informative, historically precise — and also draws the aircraft himself, working under the art direction of his friend Mike Machat. The result, as I noted when I first held the finished book, is a volume so superb in appearance that you don't immediately realize how jam-packed it is with anecdotes and facts. The beauty of the thing is a kind of camouflage for its substance.
The subject is British Airways during the Imperial Years, 1919–1939 — the aircraft of those sometimes strange but always strangely beautiful decades when British commercial aviation was finding its feet and its identity. Davies personally knew some of the people involved with early British Airways, and that personal connection gives the narrative a warmth and specificity that no amount of archival research alone can provide. These are not just airplanes and routes and schedules. These are stories, told by a man who understands that the machines were only as interesting as the people who flew and built and argued over them.
The Imperial Years produced aircraft of a quality that has never been fully appreciated outside specialist circles — sometimes strange, always strangely beautiful, and now brought to life here with a completeness and affection that does full justice to their place in history.
My recommendation is simple: this is a must-have on a variety of levels. It is essential for anyone interested in airlines or airliners. It is Volume 1 of a series, and if the subsequent volumes maintain this standard, the complete set will be indispensable. Buy it now, before it goes out of print and the price on the secondhand market reflects what it is actually worth.