AIRSHIPS. – Alberto SANTOS-DUMONT. My Airships, the Story of My Life. London: Grant Richards, 1904. First edition, 8vo (204 x 137mm.) Photographic illustrations, manuscript annotation to front-free endpaper and half-title by Lord Ventry. (Light spotting to preliminaries, toning.) Original boards (lightly rubbed). Note: Lord Ventry co-wrote ‘Jane’s Pocket Book 7: Airship Development’ and he also set up the ‘The Airship Club’ in 1948 to fund the building of an airship. Eventually, Ventry’s airship – named ‘Bournemouth’ - had its first flight in 1951. It made eleven flights before crash landing in 1952. Provenance: Lord Ventry (ink annotation to preliminaries). – And a further twenty-five volumes related to airships, Zeppelins, ballooning and early aeronautics (Ernst A. Lehmann’s ‘Zeppelin. The Story of Lighter-than-air Craft’, 1937, 8vo and ‘The Hero of a Thousand Flights’, [1913], 4to, and Griffith Brewer’s ‘Theory of Ballooning’, 1918, 8vo, and ‘The Andree Diaries’, 1931, 8vo, and also a French cast paper-weight model of a De Dion Bouton single cylinder engine) (26).