The most colourful of Toronto's Fireside Publications magazine sized "A 3.00 Immortal Classic for fifty cents" series is Rocket Flight to the Moon by Jules Verne. Of course this is a renamed From the Earth to the Moon, first published in 1865 as De la Terre a la Lune. The novel and its sequel Around the Moon (Autour de la Lune, 1870) have seen many English editions with modified titles but Fireside's is the only one with rocket in the title.
Subtitled "A story to kindle atomic-age imaginations", the Fireside edition is 96 pages and undated but circa 1950. The artist of the cover and eighteen internal illustrations is unknown.
Here are a couple of nineteenth century paperback editions of From the Earth to the Moon.
Toronto: Fireside, nd
New York: John W. Lovell, nd
London: Ward, Lock, nd
Such an obvious attempt at appealing to post-war "atomic-age imaginations", yet the cover looks so very much like something from the 'thirties. Do the interior images seem similarly dated?
ReplyDeleteAnd then we have the use of "Rocket" in the title. If memory serves, our adventurers are actually sent to the moon in a projectile shot by a massive cannon. No rocketry involved!
Good point. The Baltimore Gun Club did not launch a rocket. Here is NASA's discussion of rocket principles:
ReplyDeletehttp://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/education/rocket/TRCRocket/rocket_principles.html
The interior illustrations are not the same as the cover. They're more accurate.