J. C. Boonshaft Collection of Nevil Shute

J. C. Boonshaft Collection of Nevil Shute

A comprehensive collection of the works of engineer and novelist Nevil Shute (1899-1960), who was raised in England and Ireland, and was educated at Shewsbury. After military service in the first world war, Shute studied engineering at Balliol College, Oxford, and worked at the de Havilland aircraft company. He joined the team working on the R100 airship and began writing novels in his spare time. The crash of the rival airship R101 ended British appetite for lighter than air flight, and in 1931 Shute started a passenger aircraft company which he ran until 1938, when he became a full time writer. “Some of his earlier fiction, by taking advantage of his intense and very up-to-date knowledge of aeronautics (and of boffins or back-room boys), verges very closely on sf” (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). His novels were popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Disillusioned with British politics after the second world war, Shute moved to Australia, where he set his two best-known works, A Town Like Alice and On the Beach. He wrote an engaging memoir of his early career, Slide Rule. The J. C. Boonshaft Collection of Nevil Shute was formed in the 1980s and 1990s and includes some choice inscribed books and proof copies.