Airstream: The History of the Land Yacht

by Bryan Burkhart and David Hunt

Book Overview

Sleek and shiny, Airstream trailers have been turning heads on the highways since they first started caravanning across America in the 1930s. These "aluminum skinned, gleaming silver bullets" are currently enjoying a revival in popularity. Praised for their clean lines and timeless aesthetic, movie stars and design buffs are snapping up these vintage beauties. Airstreamequal parts travelogue, cultural history, and biography of Wally Byam, Airstream's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811824713
• ISBN13: 9780811824712
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 10.8" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Lots of great information

Interesting information and photos. Anyone that wants to know more about Airstreams or just loves the American Icon should add this to their book collection.

Sterling!!

This book is wonderful. I'm going to have to purchase a new copy for my dad's Christmas present, I've worn this copy out reading it. The photographs are vintage, the text facinating and informative.

A visual feast, along with the interesting content.

Well, although this book does talk a lot about Wally Byam (how can you not when refering to Airstreams), I found it to be very interesting, and a lot of fun. The book is designed beautifully, the pictures are fantastic, and it is a visual feast. I just bought my own used Airstream, and love it. If you've ever owned an airstream, or if you've just admired them from afar, this book is just too much fun to own. It makes a great coffee table book, or a great gift for the enthusiast.

It's a far cry from trailer trash . . .

After flipping through just a few pages of this amazing book, you'll want to trade in your daily routine for the life of a global nomad. But if circumstances won't allow you to hit the road in your own shiny silver bullet right away, Airstream's fantastic words and pictures will provide a wonderful escape. You'll travel vicariously to exotic locales from Egypt to Moscow and will be quoting "Byam-isms" in no time like "Adventure is where you find it, any place, every place, except at home in the rocking chair."

Superb graphics, archival photos, and historical text!

This coffee table book is a great gift - striking images, an original topic, really interesting text, and it's reasonably priced. The book follows the inventor of the Airstream, an eccentric wanderer named Wally Byam, as he spreads his gospel ("Adventure is where you find it, any place, every place, except at home in the rocking chair.") and organizes Airstream caravans around America and around the planet. We see these Zelig-like aluminum torpedoes with every famous backdrop: the Egyptian pyramids, rice fields in Thailand, the leaning tower of Pisa, and Red Square in communist USSR. The photos are at once kitschy and nostalgic and hokey and beautiful, and the layout of the book allows each image to really resonate before leading you to another page or chapter in the life of Wally Byam's "land yacht." A terrific piece of Americana, and a great, reasonable find...