Description

Mainstream Publishing Company, [Published Date: 1991]. Hardcover, 112 pp. Second Edition, reprint. Very good in very good dust jacket. Green cloth covered boards with gold lettering on spine. light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. There's a hint of spotting to the edges of the textblock. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and light creasing along edges. light overall scuffing to jacket as well. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. Black and white illustrations throughout with an eight page section of color illustrations in the middle. [From front jacket flap] In 1883 a start was made on a bridge across the Forth: when it was finished, 7 years later, it was called "the greatest bridge in history, "the first engineering wonder of the world ... of marvellous symmetry and perfect proportions", "the supremest specimen of all ugliness" The building of it claimed 57 lives, 60,000 tons of steel, millions of rivets, and much more besides, and the finished structure is about twice as strong as it needs to be. The Forth Railway Bridge has aroused more curiosity than almost any structure in Britain. Ruskin wished that the bridge had never been built, and yet Sir Kenneth Clark chose to have a photograph of it on the back cover of his highly acclaimed Civilisation. Loved and hated, the bridge has come to symbolise those qualities which posterity most readily associates with the Victorians: soliditv, practicality and industry. Anthony Murray celebrates the astonishing construction by first considering the history of the Queens Ferry and looking at earlier proposals for a bridge, and then by showing how the engineers and men who built it managed to overcome the impossible. Full of stories and interesting detail, the book is lavishly illustrated with photographs of all stages of construction and a curious collection of postcard views and other ephemera of the bridge.