Far Horizons

Well, bringing out the Inside Information book led me to delve deeper into the bookshelf and put me in quite the nostalgic mood. As I have often mentioned, my dad was a huge fan of aircraft (and trains and ships to a degree) and encouraged me to look at different types of aircraft, both in books and in models. My chief love has always been space, but something of my fathers fascination with the majesty and awe of planes rubbed off on me. So when I was scouting for vintage space books online, a while back, I found a couple of very early sixties, children's books which took me right back to my childhood. 'Timothy's Book of Space and Aircraft' by Collins, showed a small boy being educated in aerospace technology by his dad, in a fine period style - dad in trilby and sports jacket and little Tim in shorts and sandals. The painted illustrations by T.E North make up for their lack of technical accuracy with dynamism and drama - especially the English Electric Lightning on the Aircraft cover.

The space book is written by Maurice Allward, who went on to write the excellent Daily Mirror Book of Space and the 1968 Encyclopedia of Space. Again, the paintings are a little garish and naive in places, but show what astronautics were like in the early sixties. Both books are undated, but the Space one shows the projected Mercury mission, which puts it at the very start of the decade.

The book goes through the usual history of space travel from ancient myths to chinese rocket warfare, before looking at Robert Goddard and on to captured V2 technology.

Allward is always excellent on technical detail and the less well known aspects of space travel and swiftly moves on to projected plans for the future, with Von Braun spacewheels and huge lumbering moon landers.

Like many of his contemporaries, there is the view that life exists on other planets and its simply a question of time before man visits the planets and teaches those upstart aliens a thing or two about british stiff upper lip and all that! What?!

 

The aircraft book is illustrated by North, but the text is  uncredited, but may be by Allward too, who also published aeronatical texts.

There are some lovely big sky renditions of the cutting edge aircraft of the day, such as the Vulcan and Valiant, plus a look at a 'large airplane factory' where Timothy meets a typical aircraft pilot, replete with neatly trimmed moustache and smoking a pipe.

Once more there are full page paintings of great aircraft, accompanied by somewhat twee text, very much the product of its time. On the cover, Timothy looks to have aged somewhat and the paintings are a little less soft than the space book, but it is still a nice, nostalgic read from a period when Britain had a foothold in the aeronautics industry.