Friday, July 1, 2016

You Will Go to the Moon (1959) (Part 2)




Continuing with my 500th ULTRAMEGA Posting to celebrate my favorite children's book.

When we last left our hero he was on his way to the Moon!


The illustration above of watching a baseball game from space haunted my dreams. To have space travel so ordinary that we could just "hang out" and eat snacks while we went to the Moon.



This is what is known as a "text dump". The author had so much they needed/wanted to say that this is the wordiest page in the book.




Bounding across the surface of the Moon, colorful and cool "Moon cars", and mountain climbing with one hand. The Moon never seemed so fun.  Which lead to my favorite page in the book, the view from the top looking down at the moon base. I must have returned to this pages hundreds of times.

And a final look ahead to when we will go to Mars. The vision of a frontier that waits for us and the hope that someone will be inspired to go further yet.









The authors added a 2 page glossary of terms at the back to give parents and educators a little help with the questions a child might ask. The book has only 186 words and they tried to limit to words a child might already know. This gave them a chance to add a few technical terms.

1971 reprint edition (updated for Apollo)

1972 British reprint edition

The reprint illustrations were a shadow of the originals with a paler color scheme.

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