The Coming Age Of Rocket Power.

The copyright page states “First Edition,” Harper & Brothers, 1945, and the book is manufactured under wartime paper-saving regulations. The acknowledgments are dated New York, 1 December 1944, and thank Goddard for correspondence, and John Shesta and James Wyld for checking the calculations; the illustrations are the work of the industrial designers Jacques Martial and Robert Scull. The dedication names his colleagues in the American Rocket Society, among them Shesta, Wyld, Laurence Manning, Lovell Lawrence Jr., H. F. Pierce, Cedric Giles and Alfred Africano, and his wife Lee Gregory Pendray.

Seventeen chapters run from “An Equal and Contrary Reaction” and “The Hunger of the Beast” through engines, flight and the early history (“Saltpeter’s Child,” “The Persistent Man,” “Rooting of the Seed,” “Years of Tribulation”) to the wartime rocket (“The Sword of Fire,” “With Ten-fold Fury,” “Giant’s Hand”), sounding rockets, “Over Land and Over Sea,” “Faster than the Sun,” “Journeys to the Moon?” and “The Day to Come.” An appendix, “A Lexicon of Rocket Power,” and an index close the book. A plate section after page 116 shows rocket-launching ships, JATO takeoffs, British and American rocket-armed aircraft, the bazooka, the V-1 and V-2 motors, and Goddard’s liquid-fuel rockets.

The jacket front promises “an outstanding authority on rockets and their future,” and the back panel profiles Pendray as an organizer and past president (1934–36) of the American Rocket Society, editor of its Astronautics, and Westinghouse public-relations executive who directed the New York World’s Fair Time Capsule; it also notes his fiction written as Gawain Edwards. The jacket is worn, with a tear across the front title.