Christmas would not be the same without a good book. Amazingly though, I didn't get any this year, but while I was in the Lake District at the front of the month, I picked up a few. Penrith in Cumbria is a lovely old town with a fair few charity shops and the local Salvation Army one had a great book selection.
One of my major gripes is that you can never find vintage space books second hand, which is surprising considering the amount that flooded the shelves between 1965 and 1973. Still, I was gratified to see some nice examples of recent, rather than vintage, books available for a pound or so each.
Universe is a lavish paperback showing near Earth and distant galactic objects courtesy of the Hubble and recent space probes up to Cassini. Each page has a glorious colour spread and a few lines of text, letting the images really stand out. Exploring the Universe is a more astronomical text book, but laden with info and imagery on the solar system and beyond.
The best one is far and away Vision of Space by David Hardy, which showcases great space art by himself and contemporary artists such as Robert McCall.
Hardy came to my attention in the early seventies with a book I discovered in the local library and pored over regularly. It was written by Patrick Moore and lavishly illustrated by Hardy and published initially in 1972.
Challenge of the Stars was a great favourite of mine at the time, as the designs shown in it echoed the vehicles from Brooke Bonds Race into Space card set and also the ships on the pull out poster given away in Countdown magazine - Space- Forward to 1988. The tubular Mars mission ships and modular space tugs all reflected the same design aesthetic and really fired my imagination at the time.
The technical info is dated by current standards, as the only real probe missions were Viking and Voyager and the extensive exploration of Mars was still decades away.
Hardy is a competant, if simplistic illustrator, but his images are always dramatic. His image of an ice cave on Pluto clearly references the 1911 Antarctic expedition and certain other elements share characteristics with other photographs.
As the Visions book reminded me of the earlier volume, a quick google found a secondhand copy and surprisingly, the updated 1978 version very cheaply.
The update uses some of the original art, but also changes some of the images for greater impact. The Grand Tour (Voyager) mission is noticably similar to the corresponding card in the Brooke Bond series, released some years earlier.
Where the New Challenge of the Stars really stands out is as an example of the 'star wars effect' - as the cover has changed from a asteroid space tug to a fictional rendition of a death star type station and two ships clearly borrowed from star destroyers. The text also includes a large section on Interplanetary War, an obvious trope included to catch the eye of younger audiences.
Great art- I was just too old to collect the Brook Bond cards- had to make do with Zoom's series and Sky Ray (the latter were still pretty good). But I don't remember any good space art books, just articles in Annuals such as Eagle -once again, just too old at the time, I think..
ReplyDeleteYou're never too old for space Andy!
ReplyDeleteThink I've grown back into it...
ReplyDeleteThat's a great comparison between Hardy's Pluto ice cave and the 1911 Antarctic expedition photograph, which I think is an incredible image! Good to see you discovered some second hand space books at last, Bill :)
ReplyDeleteNicely researched. Thank you.
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