Books of Future, Past....

Well, school is starting back once again, and as I get ready to greet students old and new, my mind turns to.....books! Books are actually taking a slightly lessor role in schools now (what with all them fancy-smancy electronic tablets and such) but in my day if you wanted to know something, you grabbed a book, dadgumit! Now excuse me, I gotta take a nap....

Ok, I feel better now. So, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, books! For this week's post, I walked all the way over to my small bookcase behind my chair and grabbed the following:

Some of the most interesting books from the space race were actually aimed at kids. (Not literally, throwing books at children is wrong.) These books give us a pretty good feel as to how the typical American was viewing space travel at the time.

The first book, "Rockets, Jets, Guided Missiles and Space Ships" was written in 1951 by Jack Coggins and Fletcher Pratt. The forward was written by none other than Willy Ley, who went on to become a consultant for Walt Disney's Tomorrowland series (see what I did there). The science is pretty sound 1950's stuff, but the illustrations are wonderful. If only things had turned out this sleek and shiny. Sigh... In the illustration for the trip to the moon, the TWA Moonliner's father sits proudly on the lunar surface.

We flash forward almost 20 years with the next book. Published in 1969, "Man in Space" was part of a subscription series put out by Doubleday and the National Science Service. These books came with stickers to place in the appropriate places on the pages because what with all the money they were spending putting man on the moon, they couldn't afford to do it at the factory. Just kidding!  Everything is better with stickers, even science!

You can see by the illustrations that pretty much everything had been worked out for the moon shot at this point, and, in fact, they actually had to include a typed "Science Bulletin" to update the info when we actually made it! Pretty cool stuff, but I still prefer the 1950's vision.

So there you have it. You know, I can't help but think that although new technology has us viewing science and news in pretty much real time, what will future generations pull off of their bookcases to explore our take on the world? Could our technological enlightenment bring about a future "dark ages" situation with our way of life? (cue ominous music)

Probably not.

Until next time fly 'em fast and high!