Twelve Stories About Space Travel.

Polish title Dwanaście opowieści o lotach kosmicznych (the cover reads “12 opowieści o lotach kosmicznych”). Signed in ink on the half-title by the author, Eustachy Bialoborski, then Vice President of the Polish Astronautical Society and a member of the British Interplanetary Society. Published by the Ministry of National Defense press, Warsaw, in 1957 (first edition, a run of 6,000 copies, printed at the Wojskowe Zakłady Graficzne), with a cover by Zbigniew Weiss; a printed errata slip is tipped in at the front.

The Introduction notes that after the Second World War the V-2 had shown what a rocket could do, and that in 1955 four countries announced artificial satellites. Twelve “tales” follow, covering the rocket as a weapon of science and war, ancient dreams of space flight, the nature of rocket motion, the journey to Mars, Tsiolkovsky and the mass ratio, jet and rocket engines, the construction of a rocket vehicle (multistage rockets, the V-2, the transcontinental rocket), atomic propulsion, and building a space station (Tsiolkovsky’s island, Noordung’s station, Ross’s artificial moon).

The last tales deal with interplanetary travel, weightlessness (“what Jules Verne did not know”) and a vision of the future. A physical-astronomical-rocket appendix gives twelve tables, followed by a name index and bibliography. Illustrated with photographs and drawings. The author’s German-language Raketen Satelliten Raumschiffe (1958) is also in this catalog.