Roadmaking Materials In Northern Borneo

Roadmaking Materials in Northern Borneo (1965)
by Department of Scientific & Industrial Research — Road Research Laboratory (HMSO)
ISBN: none | Condition: Good
Sold by Crappy Old Books

At last: the field manual for anyone who has ever gazed at a tropical hillside and wondered, “Could that become a respectable A-road?” Roadmaking Materials in Northern Borneo (1965) is the Road Research Laboratory at its most intrepid — starched shirts, sweaty clipboards, and a noble determination to classify every rock that stood between civilisation and the next market town. It’s part geology, part logistics, and entirely confident that the correct gravel can hold society together through monsoon, mud, and mysterious squeaks from the Land Rover.

Inside you get the full RRL treatment: laterites assessed like suspect characters in a detective novel; granites interviewed for strength and moral fibre; river gravels weighed, washed, and told to pull themselves together. There are careful paragraphs on plastic clays that behave beautifully until the first raindrop, stern notes on drainage (the difference between road and canoe), and tidy tables where aggregates line up to confess their Los Angeles abrasion values. You can almost hear the thermos clink and the survey chain sigh.

And then there’s the map — an enormous, wall-worthy, fold-out geological extravaganza lurking in a pocket at the back like a friendly stowaway. Unfurl it and your room gains instant authority. It shows, with heroic composure, where Northern Borneo has obligingly placed its limestone, where it hid the decent gravels, and where it insists on being swamp out of sheer spite. It’s the kind of cartography that makes you want to point at a coloured polygon and say, “Yes, we’ll take two quarries and a causeway.”

Condition: Good — which is to say the covers are dignified, the pages are sound, and the mighty fold-out map remains present, attached, and ready to overwhelm your nearest flat surface. Expect honest shelfwear and the faint scent of drawing-office tea mingled with tropical daydreams; perhaps a discreet pencil tick beside a particularly promising laterite.

Perfect for civil engineers, geo-nerds, colonial-era infrastructure historians, or anyone who enjoys the deadpan romance of turning landscapes into load-bearing sentences. Prop the map on your wall, leave the book on the coffee table, and watch guests slowly realise you own a comprehensive guide to the rocks of Northern Borneo purely for fun.

Tenderly rescued by Crappy Old Books, where we specialise in glorious, oddly specific government triumphs — and in maps so big they double as conversation pieces and emergency tablecloths.

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