Hans Hardt’s Mondfahrt.

The original of the story later issued in English as By Rocket To The Moon (1931), subtitled Eine abenteuerliche Erzählung (“an adventurous tale”), with eight tone plates by Richard von Grünberg. It is a boys’ adventure novel in the Union Jugendbücher series, built on the rocket research of the day. The imprint page says it was already in its seventh printing in 1928, the year of copyright, and that it “also appears in book form in Danish, Finnish, French, Dutch, Norwegian and Hungarian”.

In a foreword dated Tegernsee, summer 1928, Gail asks whether Verne’s Moon voyage is nearly reality. He sketches two routes to it, Oberth’s and the Vienna research society’s signal-rocket line and Max Valier’s rocket-plane line, and says Hans Hardt’s adventures are “no mere utopia” but logical consequences of current research. A list of scientific sources names Oberth, Valier, Walter Hohmann, Edgar Dacqué, and F. Wencker-Wildberg.

In the first chapter, “Zwölf Uhr sieben” (“Seven Past Twelve”), a Michigan newspaper reporter, Tommy Bighead, is stopped on a Detroit road by a stranger who asks the time and says he is Hans Hardt, a German. The 33 chapters (pp. 9–198) cover the preparations, the take-off, the weightless flight, the arrival, and the Moon’s ice, craters, and a crashed relic, and an afterword on p. 201 closes the book.

The English edition is not a line-for-line copy: it carries Gail’s foreword with an added paragraph on his earlier cosmic novels, and its chapters are numbered and titled differently. The English edition, By Rocket To The Moon, is also in this collection.