I’ve not had much
luck trawling book fairs, and things were looking typically bleak the
other day when a visit to the annual fair in a nearby village hall looked like
drawing another blank. Someone did have a first edition Nineteen Eighty-Four on offer, but I was put off by the tatty dust
jacket – not to mention the £350 price tag. Finding nothing affordable at eye
level, I resorted to rummaging in the ‘bargain boxes’ on the floor, where
finally I found this tatty Scholastic Book Services, New York offering for the
princely sum of a pound:
A children's book published in 1970,
it celebrates the Apollo 11 moon landing, and gushes with enthusiasm about the immediate
future of space exploration. ‘For space explorers,’ it says, ‘anything is
possible.’ It shows the proposed landing sites of future Apollo missions, up to and
including Apollo 20 – Apollo 17, in 1972, would actually be the last –
and speculates that permanent moon colonies could be established, and the first
manned landings made on Mars, by the early 1980s…
Fascinating!
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