Descripción
Bitumen: the black gold of the bypass age. This stout 1962 handbook from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research?Road Research Laboratory (published by HMSO, naturally)?arrives like a clipboard in hardback form, briskly explaining how to persuade stones and sticky goop to become a road and then stay a road. It?s the sort of book that believes in gradients, aggregate sizes, and the quiet authority of a line drawing. The writing is beautifully unfussy, the diagrams straight from the golden era of ?men in ties standing beside test rigs,? and the confidence level is set permanently to ?we measured it, so it?s true.? Inside you?ll find earnest discussions of viscosity at 25°C, the philosophical difference between tar and bitumen (there is one and it matters, apparently), and the noble art of laying a surface that can survive lorries, frost, and the occasional Morris Minor. Expect laboratory methods with the charm of a school chemistry set?ring-and-ball softening points, penetration grades, Marshall stability?plus a comforting number of tables where everything is either ?satisfactory,? ?borderline,? or ?see Appendix.? Imperial measurements abound, because of course they do, and there?s a reassuring certainty that any problem, no matter how asphaltic, can be solved with a better sieve, a hotter burner, or a sterner memorandum. It?s also a time capsule: the pre-motorway optimism hums along in the background, like a B-road on a summer afternoon. You can almost smell the tar heater and tea in enamel mugs. The Road Research Laboratory speaks in tidy sentences, as though pausing only to pencil in a neat tick beside ?solve rutting.? Fold-out graphs appear with all the theatrical flourish of a curtain call, and the line art has angles so crisp you could use them to cut a verge. If you?ve ever felt a private thrill at a freshly rolled surface course or caught yourself admiring the controlled chaos of a chip spreader, this is your romance novel. Condition: Good, which in the language of Crappy Old Books means ?honestly used, staunchly loyal.? Expect shelfwear, maybe a corner that once lost a duel with a filing cabinet, and the patina of a book that has actually seen daylight (and quite possibly a site hut). No ISBN?because this is 1962 and books were identified by title, publisher, and the smell of bitumen on the foreword. The pages remain perfectly legible, the figures proudly upright, and the tone as steady as a surveyor?s level. Why buy it? Because modern PDFs don?t understand the pleasure of a neat appendix on binder selection. Because roads still exist, defying weather and wheel, and this book explains the pact we made with physics to keep them that way. And because every shelf deserves at least one volume that can say, with straight-faced certainty, ?reduce voids in the mineral aggregate,? and make it sound like poetry.
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