Space Travel.

The first U.S. edition of William Temple’s introduction to space travel, issued as The Prentice-Hall Book About Space Travel and illustrated with black-and-white drawings by Harry Billings. The British edition (The True Book About Space Travel) was adapted here with minor changes to suit American readers; the book is dedicated “For Cliff.”

Twelve chapters run from “The Flying Carpet” and “The Squib Grows Up” through “The Man-Carrying Rocket,” “Between Heaven and Earth,” “Is Anybody Home?” and “The Atomic Space-Ship” to “To Be a Spaceman,” “Brush Up Your Martianese!” and “A Letter from Tomorrow.” The jacket promises the story from the Chinese invention of the rocket around 1200 A.D. to the German rockets of WWII and the space ships of the future, with sections on flying saucers, the Moon and space-suits, radio-astronomy, the possibility of life on other planets, and where space stations will be located.

The jacket describes Temple as an authoritative writer on interplanetary flight in England, one of the earliest members of the British Interplanetary Society and at one time editor of its Journal, as well as a science-fiction author. The Society’s Arthur C. Clarke, whose Interplanetary Flight is also in this catalog, belonged to the same circle.