Rockets And Jets.

A non-technical account of rockets and rocketry, illustrated with drawings by James MacDonald and with photographs. First edition, first printing, with the “I” and the war eagle emblem on the copyright page (“A Wartime Book,” produced in compliance with the government’s paper-conservation regulations); later printings lack the war eagle. Copyright 1945 by Herbert S. Zim; the frontispiece shows the flashes of rockets used against German bombers by the British Home Guard.

In the Foreword, dated Port Washington, N.Y., January 1945, Zim describes how the story of rockets is clouded by wartime secrecy and thanks G. Edward Pendray, who wrote accounts of early American rocket experiments and supplied photographs, Cedric Giles of the American Rocket Society, and Major Alexander P. de Seversky. He recommends Cleator’s Rockets Through Space (Catalog A), G. Geoffrey Smith’s Gas Turbines and Jet Propulsion for Aircraft and Willy Ley’s Rockets (Catalog B); the Cleator and Ley books are in this collection.

The contents run from “The Story of Things Not Yet” and basic principles through the origin of the rocket idea, rockets in battle, powder rockets, rocket vehicles, modern battle and aerial rockets, liquid fuels, rocket motors, and experimental and high-altitude rockets, to “Escape from the Earth,” the goals of interplanetary rockets, interplanetary problems, and “Jet Propulsion That Works.” Pendray’s own The Coming Age of Rocket Power (1945) is in Catalog B.