The devil will make work for idle hands and being stuck at home all day has meant that I have been able to search the net for interesting goodies. One of the many things I enjoy collecting are period space books from the sixties. Recently, I found Destination: The Moon, which was published in 1967 and what I initially assumed was a book, but which is actually a large magazine type publication. Produced by the American Science Service to presumably 'sell' the Apollo missions, its lavish and interesting with lots of beautiful painted artwork to supplement full page spreads of the previous Gemini and early Apollo tests.
It was sweeping vistas of unexplored space and grand rocket launches that sold me as a child on the whole NASA adventure and this booklet is a prime example. Very much projected and proposed ideas, rather than cold factual data, its an exciting glimpse at the run up to the moon missions.
Next up and at the other end of the scale is the Dennis Knight Activity Book, Space Flight. Essentially a booklet of info with a spread of Letraset Rub Down Transfers, I had this as a kid, but lost it along the way somewhere. On the whole, its unimpressive, with inaccurate and sloppy artwork, mostly copied from earlier books and a useless panorama on which to place the technically superior transfers.
It seems to have borrowed the cover concept from Brooke Bond Race Into Space album, some five years earlier in 1971, and uses the Mars Mission craft in the transfer images too.
Poor Yuri Gagarin is barely recognisable, but the artist has done a fair job representing the spacecraft. The moon on the rub down panorama looks like a McDonalds dessert however and any concept of relative scale has gone out the airlock window.
However, the obligatory glimpse into the future pages are more interesting, showing the Brook Bond Mars artwork which has clearly been lifted from the rear of the album, a couple of rather busy looking space stations, a nice McCallesque space shuttle and tucked away in a corner, an ATS derivative.
On the last pages, we see a photonic propulsion spacecraft and a rather clumsy drawing of the famous Wellsian Martian taken from the early french version of War of the Worlds.
This was the very first time I saw the octopoidal Martians in this style and was part of the reason I bought the Takara Science Museum figures a couple of years ago, as the fleshy tentacled creatures fit in much better with my impression of the beasts from the story.
