Collecting Nevil Shute books

 

From my copy of...

"In the Wet"

Contemporary technology which inspires.

Hi

For a while I have been a fan of Nevil Shute books, but for a while the books sort of accumulated randomly. At some stage, I got slightly more serious about reading them and ordered a copy of his autobiography, "Slide Rule".

I'm an engineer, and Nevil Shute Norway was as well. He worked in the early 1900's and he, and his protagonists are sort of intellectual swashbucklers, a bit like me. Some early aerodynamic human powered vehicles used some of the best airship / dirigible / zeppelin technology he describes in his books. The technology might be called steampunk today.

A bit later, and I am actively looking for his books on Facebook marketplace and ebay, and eventually find a lady in Richmond selling a lot of them for $5.00 each, so I head over there at an arranged time and pick up about 20 books.

Then I do a stocktake, comparing my accumulations with a self made spreadsheet of the Wikipedia  entry for Mr. Shute. Lots of doubles and some gaps still, and after this I was 3 or 4 books short and I quickly order these on ebay. Now I'm only one book short, I don't have the "The Seafarers" which is more expensive and rarer than the others. Is was only released in 2002, 42 years after Shute died.

At one stage I thought I might review every one of Shute's books but will suffice with this entry, and add a few images as I feel like it.