Space School

A while bacj I stumbled upon a lovely series of booklets, published in the early sixties by Nelson Doubleday. Called the American Science Service, the booklets appear to be educational resources, printed on cheap stock with separate sheets of colour litho printed stickers to insert into the booklets, in specified parts of the text.

The Science Series covers a wide variety of general subects, but also catches the space race zeitgeist with a number of themed booklets. Each one is roughly A5 size and runs to about 68 pages, with a separate four page insert of stickers. 

Each book is thorough and informative, with the Rockets one being written by renowned expert Willy Ley. As they are mostly pre-apollo launch era, they feature some great shots of the earlier space programme, such as Thor Agena, Atlas and Titan. An early Saturn 1A graces the cover of one.

Considering their age, all of the copies I have found have been remarkably well preserved, with all the stickers present. I have another issue on Submarines which has had the stickers applied, but its still in great condition. There are a couple of other space titles available, which I am looking out for.

'Moon' is a good astronomical text, with some beautiful painted illustrations which look like the work of Chesley Bonestell, showing pre-landing speculations about the lunar surface.

 Rockets and Satellites give a good background on early sixties research vehicles, with an informative text and illustrations, but where the series really jumps out for me is the two sheets of stickers from Satellites.(top of page)

The photographs for the satellite stickers show what appear to be high end prototype models, probably made by the individual companies touting for the contract to build the early satellites and show wonderful colour images of Ranger, Early Bird, Tiros and Relay - all shot in a nice creative fashion.

 The stickers for Rockets are great too, with large half page images of missiles and launch vehicles.