SMOKE gets in your lens - ENDLOSE Dampfreise DIGITAL EDITION

£8.75

This book has been out of print for some time, and is now reintroduced as a digital book for viewing on a computer, iPad or the like. Not downloadable on to a 'Kindle' or similar reader.

Before he published 'The Red Devil and other tales from the age of Steam', which reflected his engineering abilities, David Wardale and his colleague Günter Haslbeck published this book in 1978 - the first to reflect their photographic skills. It contains 85 colour photographs "of a most beautiful art form - the steam locomotive"; all occupying most of the ninety-six 240 mm square pages, plus 6 double-page spreads. The subjects come from the railways of a number of European and South American countries, with the largest number from South African Railways.

What makes the book unique is its concentration on the steam locomotives' aesthetic qualities, which are illustrated in widely differing ways throughout the book. There are no endless photographs of the same class of locomotives in the same, or similar locations, neither are the photographs grouped in any way, by nationality, locomotive type, or whatever - the only common feature is the steam locomotive, sometimes, clean, sometimes dirty, but always fascinating.

Where possible, the original photgraphs have been rescanned, or very similar photographs substituted for the originals, where this gave better image quality than scanning the original book.

The authors subsequently published the well known "Steam on Four Continents" series, but this was their first effort, and is excellent in every way.