The Conquest of Space.

First book in English to explore space travel. Lasser, president of the American Interplanetary Society, dedicates it to Max Valier, “the first to give his life for the conquest of space,” and H. H. Sheldon of New York University, in the introduction, calls it the first book on rockets in English, noting that anyone seeking the subject before it had only a few Russian, German and French titles.

In three parts (The Rocket, The Flight Into Space, New Worlds) and seventeen chapters, it moves from space travel in literature and the rocket’s history to rocket problems and the experiments of Goddard, Oberth, Valier and Esnault-Pelterie in Europe, then to a fictional account of the moon ship Terra, built by an international commission in the Swiss Alps. The book closes with a forecast of rocket planes in regular transatlantic service by 1950, and a warning of their use in war.

Four plates, among them frames from the film By Rocket to the Moon and a photograph of a rocket being charged with fuel at the Raketenflugplatz, and six figures, including Oberth’s three-step rocket, with an index. The dust jacket quotes Sheldon’s introduction.

The British edition (1932) is also available in this collection.