L.T.C Rolt was the first writer to give literary shape to the subjects of the industrial revolution, and his biographies of the great engineers Brunel, Telford and the Stephensons are now regarded as classics. he was also a pioneer of canal and railway preservation, and this one-volume edition of Landscape with Machines, Landscape with Canals and Landscape with Figures, published for the first time in paperback, gives us his life story. Tom, as he was known, was born in 1910. In his early career he ran a garage specializing in veteran and vintage cars, which fuelled his passion for both motor racing and good engineering. He then converted the narrow boat Cressy into a floating home, to voyage through the secret green water-lanes of England and Wales during the Second World War. His writing career blossomed while on board, with the publication of his first book, Narrow Boat. The final part of his autobiography, charting his efforts to preserve historic railways, his struggles to become a writer of repute, and his experiences as a broadcaster during the early days of television and radio, was written in the last years of his life. Inbued with the author's love of England and his intense feeling for the beauty and order of the English countryside, this book reveals a landscape populated not only by people but also by the machines with which he was fascinated.