The lore of a book

Sometime when I was a kid, I ended up with The Lore of Flight. It’s a massive publication—426 pages, a foot wide in all dimensions. This makes it more of an artifact, in my mind, than a book. “Book” seems like an incomplete way to describe it.

Whatever it is, it’s marvelous.

I imagine it to be a classic of aviation history, though I don’t actually know that to be true. I’ve never talked about it with other aviation people, and it doesn’t seem to come up much (or be currently in print). It just seems like a classic because it manages to be all sorts of great things at once: Technical and beautiful. Enormous and digestible. Scientific and human. Spare and rich.

The illustrations have always lingered in my mind, like when you accidentally look at something bright and its outline stays zapped into your vision for a while. Even the line drawings seem like they were created with such care.

It strikes me now that this book had a lot to do with my love for aviation. It showed Young Erik that aviation was special and worthy of that level of care. Down to the last bolt on a plane’s structure (which has been drawn lovingly), the book’s makers applied the same level of design thought and expertise that someone might apply to an aircraft.

I own it again today, and it shows me that design is magical not only (or even primarily) because it’s practical, but because it can fill you with wonder in ways you don’t understand.

Maybe you don’t really need to understand.