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Reading List More from Dreams of Space - Books and Ephemera
Some nice space pictures (to color) for you today. Coloring books may be one of the ultimate forms of ephemera. There were meant to be used, admired? and then thrown away. Yet many children owned them and there were at least 40 issued between 1950 and 1970 on space themes. If pictures are a universal communication then these children got a lot of input about what their future in space would look like. This particular one is full of futuristic dreams of what space flight might be from the viewpoint of the beginning of our men into space programs. Rockets and Space Coloring Book. New York: Treasure Books. (51 p.) 1960. This first batch seems to be copied from older 50's space images This image on the right above seems a little odd. It can't be on the Moon since there is a helicopter. What is the palm tree doing in the loading of the lunar ship? Does it leave from the tropics? Does it launch "single stage direct?" This image above also needs more explanation. Is this a Russian launch system? I don't remember it. "Ready for take-off" to aim at targets on Earth? That spaceship has a really big window
Die Mondexpedition is the original German book that was translated into English in 1969 as The Log of a Moon Expedition. It's full title at the time was Die Mondexpedition: 14 Mal 24 Stunden auf dem Mond roughly translated as The Lunar Expedition: 14 times on the moon for 24 hours. Which I simplify as "The Lunar Expedition: 14 days on the Moon." The author and illustration was Ludek Pesek, a well known space artist. See his Wikipedia article here. He illustrated space and planetary themes in books and National Geographic illustrations since 1963. This was his first science fiction novel which he chose to illustrate with lush paintings of an expedition to the Moon. I blogged about the English language copy of this book in 2009. If you have not seen these before I am happy to show you some wonderful art you might have missed. Pesek, Ludek. Illustrated by Pesek, Ludek. Die Mondexpedition: 14 Mal 24 Stunden auf dem Mond . Recklinghausen: Paulus Verlag. (126 p.)
Even if a bit inappropriate, given politics, here is a cool Russian pop-up book. Not really space flight oriented but still interesting. Our Defenders was a book illustrating the Russian military including battlefield rockets. The images are stereotypical of Soviet times and an interesting choice for a children's book. Mihalkov. Sergei. Illustrated by Beslik, A. НАШИ ЗАЩИТТНИКИ (Our Defenders.) Moscow: Baby Publishing (Mayysh) House. (16 p.) 1976.
As I got through boxes I found a couple of My Weekly Readers that I had not shared before. My Weekly Reader posts seem to be popular for their nostalgia effect and because as ephemera no one saved them from their youth. These particular ones are about the Gemini missions. At the time in elementary school many children saw these as their "space news" since the adult papers were not written at a basic level. So even if these are short articles they bring back a time when America was headed for the moon. Don't you wish you had lived in this neighborhood? Pretty fun to see someone's answers to the quiz. How did you do?
More in history
LAST OCTOBER I published a short breakdown of four geopolitical ‘schools’ that might shape China strategy under Trump. That piece was a pre-election preview of a much larger report I was writing for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. I published the preview as security: Trump might not win. If so I had better publish something before election day while interest in Trumpworld was guaranteed. Trump won. Interest in GOP debates did not abate. I continued to work on the report. As of this week the full thing is out. You can read it, in all its twenty-page glory, over at the FPRI website. What follows are some of its key points:
Civil rights icon Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr was shot and killed on April 4, 1968, on a motel balcony in Memphis. One of the earliest successes of the civil rights movement was a boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to … Continue reading The Assassination of Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr →
From Dwarfs to Wise Men... What's Up With the Number 7?
Ever thought about whether the world is there only because you think it is? That’s what George Berkeley meant with his philosophy of idealism. The 18th-century philosopher came up with a pretty wild idea: “To be is to be perceived.” According to him, we don’t find objects, and the world exists separately from our […]
Despite its status as one of the most widely known and studied epic poems of all time, Homer’s Iliad has proven surprisingly resistant to adaptation. However much inspiration it has provided to modern-day novelists working in a variety of different traditions, it’s translated somewhat less powerfully to visual media. Perhaps people still watch Wolfgang Petersen’s […]
