Growing up in the grip of the space age, there was always a wealth of space books available, aimed at both children and adults. A lot of the most prevalent volumes were of the encyclopaedia type, or large pictorial history books.
Looking over vintage books on ebay and other second hand websites, I have been lucky enough to find several great examples from this period. One such prominent edition edited by Werner Von Braun and Frederick Ordway (who advised on the design and production of 2001: A Space Odyssey.), is '
Space Travel: a History'.
It takes the reader from the early days of astronomy and the theories of biblical astronomers and theorists, through to Copernicus and Brahe, with a comprehensive examination of mans' obsession with the heavens. From there, it goes into early examples of rockets and rocket engines, looking at how the chinese warlords used early rocket propelled munitions and the British Army and Navy developed rocket projectiles and successfully used them in combat.
Early rocketry pioneers, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Herman Oberth, as well as the work of Von Braun himself and his american contemporary Robert H. Goddard are given comprehensive coverage, including rare photographs of the Opel Rocket Car and Glider and pre-war german and russian test rockets.
Possibly a third of the book covers the pre-war period and the development of rockets and missiles, before moving on to the V2 missile and its eventual capture and re-development by the american scientists, with the assistance of Von Braun. With the first rocket boosters established, the book moves into the early space age and the launching of the first satellite, the russian Sputnik and the birth of the space race.
The large format book devotes full page spreads to excellent shots of space probes and launch vehicles, from all over the world, including rare shots of soviet bloc craft.
Next up, we have a smaller, but equally comprehensive volume, '
The New Space Encyclopedia'. This is a small, but quite heavy book, which looks at the terminology of space and includes an entry for most of the terms emerging at the time. It covers astronomy as well as space technology and dates from the late 1960's. As such, it is interesting to see some of the deep space imagery taken by earth based telescopes, from the pre-Hubble period and some speculative imagery about how future developments such as moon bases and mars missions could be effected.
One of the images of a future Moonbase was used as the basis of a toy, made by Triang for the Spacex line and even found its way onto some of the packaging for the toys. It was very common to find toy and model designers using readily available books and magazines as a source of inspiration.
Once more there is considerable interest in the soviet missions into space, largely as hard factual information was difficult to come by due to the tight restrictions by the KGB and soviet news agencies, due to the intense rivalry between the West and Russia in the quest to reach the moon first.
This massive volume begins in a similar vein to the History of Space Travel, but quickly moves into the height of the space race, examining the history of NASA and the Apollo programme.
As I have come to expect with Alward, it is very visual and covers many of the less publicised areas of the space era, such as Lifting Body research and the early Saturn rocket development.
Like the Daily Mirror book, Alward looks far ahead, alongside the contemporary technology, to possible future applications of technology, such as ion and photonic propulsion. Once more, the toy company Triang have clearly used this book as the basis of the toy line Spacex, lifting some of the illustrations for packaging design imagery.
The Photonic Propulsion Space Station toy is based on the illustration above and the final toy also took its colouration from the illustration.
The Astronomical Telescopic Satellite was a design for a satellite which would eventually appear as the Hubble Telescope, but Triang, who were keen to catch the space exploration zeitgeist back in 1969, used the design as the basis of a toy version.
The highly successful Lunar Orbiter series of probes, which mapped the lunar surface in order to find a suitable Apollo landing site, are covered in the book and once more it is apparent where the basis of the packaging design for the Spacex toy was found, although the toy itself would have taken its inspiration from the real craft.
The book itself is a treasure trove of unusual and quite rare photographs and illustrations, which have been selected with care - rather than simply re-using standard publicity shots that often appear in similar books.
Besides photographs of existing technology, there are many conceptual drawings and artists renderings of hypothetical craft, such as designs for inflatable an moonbase and a very early concept drawing of the projected Voyager probe, designed to undertake the grand tour of the solar system.
There are a number of photographs taken at various shows and expo's, together with designs and models submitted by engineering companies.
The Encyclopedia of Space is possibly the best general space book of its time, both due to its huge size and production quality, but also on account of its breadth and depth of information included in its pages.
