Reference Shelf · Special Feature
The Checklist That Started This Collection
Michael L. Ciancone’s self-published bibliography, 1994
Every pre-1958 entry in this catalog carries a line reading “Ciancone: ###,” or, when the title isn’t in his bibliography, “Ciancone: N/A.” Every one of those numbers traces back to one thin, self-published pamphlet: A Collector’s Checklist of pre-1958 Books on Rocketry & Space Travel, printed in 1994 by its own author, Michael L. Ciancone, working from his own collection and a network of fellow collectors, dealers, and institutions.
A Question Dealers Kept Asking
In his own introduction, Ciancone explains the checklist began as an answer to a question book dealers kept posing to him: what specific pre-1958 titles should a collector of rocketry and space travel be chasing? No comprehensive published reference existed for the niche, so he built one himself — cross-referencing bibliographies embedded in works by Robert Bramscher, Frederick C. Durant III, Richard Jackson, Randy Liebermann, and Frederick I. Ordway III, and verifying entries with the help of fellow collectors, dealers, and institutions, including the National Air & Space Museum and Knollwood Books. The pre-1958 cutoff marks a deliberate scope: the pre-Sputnik era of rocketry and space literature, the interwar pamphlets and von Braun/Ley/Oberth-era works this collection is itself built around.
Signed, Eight Days Later
This copy carries something the colophon doesn’t: the author’s own signature, dated eight days after that first-printing date. It places this copy close to the front of what was, by every indication, a very short print run — distributed author-to-collector and author-to-dealer rather than through any wider trade. The introduction’s acknowledgments read like a partial map of the pre-1958 collecting world circa 1994, thanking Bramscher, Durant, Jackson, Liebermann, and Ordway by name, along with the dealers Lee and Peggy Price of Knollwood Books and, among the institutions consulted, Frank Winter at the National Air & Space Museum — whose own history of the interwar rocket societies sits on this same shelf.
From Pamphlet to Standard Reference
Ciancone kept expanding the project long after this first pass. It grew into The Literary Legacy of the Space Age, and later into Foreword to Spaceflight: An Illustrated Bibliography of Pre-1958 Publications on Rocketry & Space Travel (Apogee Books, 2018) that dealers and collectors actually cite today. This 1994 pamphlet, reviewed in its own right in Quest, the peer journal of spaceflight history, is the seed all of that grew from: a first-generation, self-published checklist that, as far as searching turns up, never had much circulation beyond its author’s own network — no copies located for sale or in library catalogs at the time of writing, a scarcity that likely says more about a small original print run than about the checklist’s importance to the field it helped organize.