What Colonel Glenn Did All Day (1962)

This is another of the non-fiction covers that I really like.

Hill, Robert W. What Colonel Glenn Did All Day. New York: The John Day Co. (64 p.) 26 cm. (1962)


This is a photographic scrapbook of John Glenn's flight. Each photo is captioned and linked with 1 page intervening "chapters".

Space, Time and Rockets (1952) part 2

This is another "cheap" post.  when I first bloggged about this book in December 2009 I did not have any interior scans. So here are some to update this post:

http://dreamsofspace.blogspot.com/2009/12/space-time-and-rockets-1952.html

Randolf, Rheta and Barry, Catherine. Illustrated by Stain, Jacque. Space, Time and Rockets. New York: Paxton-Slade Publishing Co. (64 p.) 28 cm. Softcover. (1952)
The book discusses the history of rockets, travel in space, planetary astronomy, and major constellations. Also reprinted at a 20 cm. size. See also: Barry. "A Trip through Space" (1954) from the same series.

This was an activity book with scattered non-fiction articles.

The illustrations were very simple but I find this "early" space literature facinating.

The images are cut off because the spine on this book was damaged and very stiff.  I did not want to "crack" the spine completely so we have only partial images of the pages of interest.

Since I mentioned the Hayden Planetarium in a previous post about its place in the early space flight movement, I find this page to sum up its reputation very nicely.

Famous Pioneers in Space (1963)

April has been a very long month and with just a few days left to post I need to up my average. So I will do a couple more book cover postings.  These are books where there is not much space art but the covers are evocative of the times.

Famous Pioneers in Space is part of the many books about America's new space program.  Children were encouraged to learn the biographies of these new heroes.

Newlon, Clarke. Famous Pioneers in Space. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co. (127 p.) 22 cm. (1963)



Instead of illustrations it has B&W photographs in an 8 page center insert. It consists of short biographies of 8 pioneers in the history of space flight. Biographies include Robert Goddard, K Tsiolkovskiy, and James Van Allen. Ends with 2 chapters of capsule biographies of the current Soviet cosmonauts and US astronauts.

The Boys' Book of Rockets (1950)

April is turning out to be a very busy month with almost no time to post.  Here is a 1950 edition of this 1947 book that I already blogged about.

http://dreamsofspace.blogspot.com/search/label/1947

Almost no difference in content but a much nicer cover.

In Space, Yuri Gagarin (1961)

Twas the Day before Yuri's Night and all through the blog,

We remember the human follower of Laika the dog

For children of the world recorded his feat
By pasting and gluing bits of magazines so neat

One child in his scrapbook had the article from USSR
That told of this man who traveled so far

A soviet man in space, a traveler around the Earth
For 108 minutes he circled it's girth

It was fifty long years ago that Yuri circled this place
How many children now remember his face?

It was a feat of some courage (and politics too)
To show the whole world what Russians could do

Yet twas something more, a foot in the door
If one man could go why not lots more?

Yuri's view from up there, showed us all a new place
And without that first trip would we have had Dreams of Space?