The Old Bus. (1932 First Edition). By Sir Charles Kingsford Smith

The Old Bus by Sir Charles Kingsford Smith.

Publisher: Herald Press, Melbourne, 1932, FIRST EDITION.

Blue cloth boards with white titles and illustration of a plane flying over mountains. Cloth boards have some marks and are rubbed, frayed and bumped at edges. Dent across spine. Binding firm. No inscriptions. Map endpapers are tanned with a bookseller's stamp to bottom margin, tiny chip to edge of rear end paper. Scatttered light foxing and minor marks to pages & b&w plates. 14 b&w plates plus frontispiece are all in good condition. Some corner creases, some minor chipping at edges, one corner has a tiny piece torn off (p53). 224 pages.

Pioneering flights in the Southern Cross. "Rising to international celebrity in the late 1920s and early 1930s when many of the world s oceanic air routes were still unflown, when aircraft were primitive and accurate navigation systems did not exist Smithy , in his famous Fokker trimotor Southern Cross, piloted the first flights across the Pacific in both directions, traversed the Tasman Sea and made the first successful westbound crossing of the Atlantic."