The Genesis of Flight: The Aeronautical History Collection of Colonel Richard Gimbel

Displays the 20,000 item collection of Colonel Richard Gimbel on the history of flight. After retiring from the U.S. Air Force, Gimbel became Curator of Aeronautical Literature at Yale where he continued building his collection, eventually donated to the US Air Force Academy in 1970. Five thousand year-old seals carved from semi-precious stones and used to inscribe clay tablets record some of the earliest known instances of the dream of flight. Of thousands of books, some date from the 15th century, some are scientific like Robert Hooke's Philosophical Collections (1682), and others are about imaginary voyages into space and other worlds, including Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1547), Cyrano de Bergerac's account of a voyage to the moon (1651), and the 19th-century classics of Jules Verne. There also some 2,000 prints, portraits, woodcuts, and lithographs, and letters and hundreds of commemorative medallions, sheet music, posters, dime novels, postcards, postage stamps, early flight manuals, catalog of aircraft equipment, match boxes, and children's games and toys. Oversize: 9x12<">. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

As a scion of the family that developed the famous department store that bears its name, the late Richard Gimbel was able to be a distinguished book collector as well as a colonel in the air force reserve. The scope of his collection proves more impressive than the size and price of this lavish showcase of its highlights. Here are 5,000-year-old Sumerian seals depicting flying men, sheet music from the early-twentieth-century days of powered flight ("Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine" is just the best known), and examples of just about every other kind of printed artifact in between. Reproduction and commentary are of the highest quality, and the latter commendably lacks the condescending technophobia that has disfigured the notes of other recent aviation-art books. Expect accredited and amateur aviation historians, art historians, popular-culture mavens, and lovers of fine bookmaking all to pore over this handsome publication. Roland Green
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