Rocket Research - History and Handbook.

The title page reads “New Edition, January 19, 1945,” with the author identified as “Diploma Engineer – Industrial Designer” and the imprint The Pen-Ink Pub. Co., 130 West 42nd Street, New York. Lent was Vice President of the American Rocket Society, and the list of illustrations opens with portraits of Lent and of Cedric Giles, then ARS president. The copyright page is dated 1945, the book is dedicated “to the pioneers in rocketry all over the world,” and a printed note says it is a wartime book produced in compliance with government paper-conservation rules.

In the Preface to the Second Edition Lent says the first edition was “literally taken off” his hands and that this printing was made under labor and paper shortages; he added new material, including new cuts of rockets and hot-air jet designs, and reprints excerpts of reviews from Skyways, Flying, Western Flying, the Herald-Tribune and others, with letters from Goddard and from Robert N. Farr of the War Department’s Science Service. Seven sections run from “Definition and General History of the Rocket” and “Early Research” through “Resume of Early Experiments by the American Rocket Society,” “The Theory of Rocket Operation,” “Practical Application of the Jet-Propulsion Motor,” and “Practical Hints to Experimenters,” to “Potential Advantages of Hot Air Jet-Propulsion.”

The book carries 105 numbered figures, four plates and a series of tables, with the photographs credited to the American Rocket Society; subjects include Goddard’s rockets, the Valier and Heylandt rocket car, Tilling’s rocket, Campini’s hot-air jet plane, the bazooka, the Katyusha, and the author’s own “Spear” rocket. The Index and List of Patents is printed from the other end of the book, in reverse. Lent’s later Rocketry (1947) is in Catalog C.