Well its an exciting time here on Marsbase as due to a recent reshuffling of personnel, I have finally been able to take over a small cabin all to myself. Its compact, but rather than having to occupy a corner of a larger living space, I can now spread out a little more and organise things a little better. Its been a timely move, as my vintage space library has been expanding. Only by a couple of items and small ones at that, in fact one of them is one of the smallest books in the library!
'Secrets of Space' is part of the Bancroft Tiddlers range, published in 1967 as part of a line of about 40+ pocket sized books for children. All the usual topics were covered, Ships, Dinosaurs, Cars and other less usual fare such as Oil, Coins and Famous Churches. Each book is tiny, less than 3" wide and composed of 32 pages, illustrated with either a full page illustration, or a diagram, with a page of explanatory text.
Compared with a contemporary pocket sized book, an Observers Guide, a Tiddler is tiny, but they are interesting fare and very much of their time. Depicting current and recent space probes and the projected Apollo Saturn Rocket, its always rewarding to look at how these early books portray future developments in space travel. Secrets of Space is no exception, with a rather nice illustration of an Orbital Space Glider near the end.
By contrast the Patterson Blick Instant Picture Book 'Outer Space' is a larger publication, similar to the Letraset Transfer books.
Although larger format, Outer Space only has 14 pages, with the centre devoted to a panorama for the buyer to apply the set of included transfers. Obviously, being a second hand book from 1972, these have been applied and some have deteriorated with time. There's nothing remarkable in terms of the choice of imagery - several LEMs, Apollo's, Saturn rockets and various astronauts together with a stray Ariel satellite, a Gemini Titan and a large Von Braun Moonship. The sister publication to this is the Dennis Knight book 'Space Flight' (see: https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2020/07/lockdown-library.html) which follows a similar theme some five years later.
I had this book as a child, but it has not survived the rigours of time as well as some others and has been discarded along the way, but my favourite pages were always the last two, which showed a futuristic station and approaching cruiser and the enigmatic illustration of the tentacular martians from War of the Worlds.
Its always interesting to look at old space books, both to see how vastly different the expected developments were, but also just to look 'back' on how things might have been.
