Visions of Spaceflight: Images from the Ordway Collection - Hardcover

Ordway, Frederick I., III; Clarke, Arthur C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568581815 ISBN 13: 9781568581811

Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr, 2000

Synopsis

A pioneering rocket scientist and collector of space images shares his collection of art and photography spanning four centuries of imagination and engineering about space travel. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

Reviews

Writer Frederick I. Ordway III worked with Werner von Braun in the early days of NASA; he also spent decades collecting pictures, paintings and diagrams of space voyages, real or imagined. With hundreds of big images in glossy color, Visions of Spaceflight: Images from the Ordway Collection makes available Ordway's hoard. Etchings of 18th-century trips to the moon, with great vultures and giant balloons, dominate one section; another includes a cover from the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (1934). Collectors may love the sometimes garish rockets and grinning spacemen from the 1950s periodicals Colliers and This Week. Arthur C. Clarke provides a one-page foreword.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Ordway started collecting art on space exploration as a youngster looking for well-illustrated sf books. Later he met and worked with Wernher von Braun, father of the U.S. space program, which greatly helped his collecting, for von Braun loved space art, too. Ordway's holdings became prodigious, and on the big pages of this superlatively designed art book, he shows off some of the best of them. The art on display ranges from the fifteenth century to 1970, though more than half is twentieth-century work, and more than half of that comes from magazine articles by von Braun and other scientists, writers, and artists, including the famous space painter Chesley Bonestell (see Ron Miller's The Art of Chesley Bonestell [BKL My 1 01]). The reproductions, many of them bled to the edges of a page or two pages, are pretty stupendous, and Ordway's 20-page account of his collection is engaging. Unfortunately, the captions, less well edited, often don't say enough about the pictures. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The human fascination with exploration beyond our own sphere is delightfully portrayed here through the etchings, book illustrations, pulp-magazine covers, and artwork in the treasured art collection of Ordway, a former director of the National Space Society and the National Space Institute. Ordway introduces his collection with a personable autobiographical essay, and his passion for all things aeronautical warms the pages. The volume is arranged chronologically from the pre-1600s to the 1950s. Each illustration is annotated by the author, who explains the theories behind the pictures and stories, from winged chariots and balloons to rockets and spaceships. Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which Ordway served as technical adviser, provides an introduction. Ordway's collection was cataloged in Blueprint for Space: Science Fiction to Science Fact (LJ 2/15/92). For a truly detailed history of the science fiction of space flight, see John Clute's Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (DK, 1995). Recommended for larger public libraries or where the history of science fiction or space flight is popular. Karen Ellis, Nicholson Memorial Lib. Syst., Garland, TX
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1568581815
• ISBN 13: 9781568581811
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176