Being a fan of both astronomy and the history of science, as well as lover of second-hand books, means I have a small but slowly growing collection of pre-and early-space age astronomy and spaceflight books.

It just got added to this weekend while I was having a walking holiday in the Lake District near Windermere - bobbing into a second-hand bookshop, I walked out with a copy of Richard Proctor's Saturn and his System from 1882, and Herbert Hall Turner's A Voyage in Space from 1915... and a wife rolling her eyes. (I bought her dinner at the Drunken Duck to make up for it).

My favourite so far is Robert Ball's In Starry Realms from 1909, where he has a brief discussion of the then-controversial Martian Canals (he sits on the fence quite admirably, stating simply that more and better observations are needed to resolve the argument).

The oldest is John Hershel's Astronomy from 1833, which is quite fragile so I rarely dare open it!

I was wondering if other BABBers have a favourite dusty tome, that they bought or read not because it's at all current any more, but because of sheer historical interest?

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I don't have any, I'm afraid, but if I was to go hunting my target would be Robert Ball's The Story of the Heavens (1885), which is mentioned in Ulysses (which would also be on my list ).

Ball, by the way, was a Dubliner.

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Yes, I've seen that one around, also Starland. But I thought I'd stick with just the one Robert Ball book - I didn't want to be greedy He had a good popular style, and in Starry Realms he went happily off on tangents - one chapter was devoted to a popular exposition of Darwin's theory of natural selection, and another devoted to Krakatoa.

He seemed, even as an elderly man, to be quite ready to receive new ideas if they provided a better explanation. At the time he wrote Starry Realms the developing theories of radioactivity were just starting to give alternative insights on how the Sun put out it's heat (the prevailing theory at the time was that the heat output was generated by gravitational collapse), and he mentions this at the preface to the 1909 revision of the book.

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My favorite old book is The Space Encyclopedia; it went through several editions, but mine was printed in 1957, on the very eve of the Space Age. It has lots of information about rocketry and the old missile tests of the '40s and '50s, and speculation about the future. There is also talk about the "strong evidence of vegetation on Mars." I love it!

Another favorite old book is Planets, which was part of an Time-Life series from the 1960s. Though far out of date, it was something of an insipiration for me. And I can't forget another influential old tome by National Geographic, titled The Solar System, which can still be found on the occasional bargain books rack.

I like any of the books written by Richard A. Proctor - I have 5 of his. Perhaps my favorite is Other Worlds Than Ours (1870). I also have a copy of Astronomy With an Opera Glass (1888) by Garrett P. Serviss which is a very enjoyable book to read. Books by Ball, Simon Newcomb and C.A. Young were also interesting reads.

It was a very different writing style back then - often poetic.

Man, all my life I’ve seen old movies which include scenes of guys (usually scientists or detectives or Sherlock Holmes) walking around in quaint little towns in England looking in old book stores, where they find great lost books of history, science, astronomy, etc. Many Americans have a bad habit of throwing old books away, but I’ve heard that some of your book stores have some great old volumes in them, with nice leather bindings and sometimes containing little notes written by their 19th Century owners.

My oldest astronomy text is Introduction to Celestial Mechanics by Forest Ray Moulton, Second Revised Edition from 1923. (Original copyright date 1914).

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You ought to visit Hay-on-Wye if you ever come here - it's on the Welsh border and full of old bookshops. Every few years I stay there for a couple of days and just enjoy getting lost in the books.

My copy of Saturn and His System had in it a rejection letter from the BBC, dated 1935! It looks like a previous owner wanted to make a lecture series out of it for The Listener which was the BBC's weekly magazine.

Actually, one of my most treasured books I got from America as I couldn't find a decent copy over here. It's Phil Cleator's Rockets Through Space published in 1935, and the first popular book on Astronautics published in the english language. Most famous for the acerbic review it got in Nature at the time of publication:

However, having read the book, I don't think Cleator makes a very good case. He goes into the theory of interplanetary navigation well enough, and states the velocity changes needed. But he glosses over the huge technology gap of the time, when the biggest rockets were a few feet in height and reached a few hundred miles an hour without stabilisation. (At the time, Goddard's work in the US was not known on this side of the pond). He basically handwaves that it will be easy enough to progress from this to a twenty-thousand ton manned rocket. I'm not sure I would have believed him!

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One of my absolute favourite astronomy books is "The Grand Tour", by Ron Miller and William K. Hartmann. I read it when I was at the age of 10-11 and it's one major reason why I am into astronomy. It has such great portraits, that I don't know what to say. I'm speechless!



Ron Miller told me that a new version of it is coming out in May, so look out for it. I know I will!


Has anyone else read it?

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This brought back a memory of a book we had when I was a child, or else I read when staying with my grandmother. It was an astronomy book for adults that described how the Lunar craters were formed by volcanoes, spewing material from the central peak to land as a rim. I can recall the cros-sectional diagrams. Laughable now. But is it?
The pic with Padawan's post reminded me - what about those sulphur volcanoes on Io? (I think Io?), that produce a perfect hemispherical dome of ejecta. They don't appear to have rims, let alone central peaks, but is that because the sulphur remains semi-liquid?

On Earth, a volcano never behaves like that - atmosphere too thick and gravity too strong - but on an air-less, smaller planetoid?
John

Never read it, but the cover art looks great! Is it a David Hardy picture?

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I'm pretty sure Ron Miller did the cover illustration. He and Hartmann have distinct styles that make their works immediately recognizable, IMO.

Count me in as a fellow Grand Tour devotee. However, a book that had a much greater impact on me was Hartmann and Miller's Cycles of Fire: Stars, Galaxies, and the Wonder of Deep Space; it focuses more on visualizations of exoplanets and exotic stars and galaxies. I got it when I was 10, and it was arguably the most influential book in propelling my path along astronomy.

Yup, I would say so too!

Apparently there are already two versions of this book, with the other having a black cover. I'm really looking forward to reading the new version that will be out in May.

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Here is an interesting 1884 article titled “Dream-Space,” by Richard Proctor, who is criticizing an article Professor Author Cayley wrote a few months earlier about little two-dimensional beings living on the surface of a sphere. Helmholtz had recently presented this anthropomorphic version of Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry theory, and Cayley expanded a little upon the idea in 1883 when he delivered a speech before the British Association. This is what led to Abbott’s “Flatland” fairy tale of 1884. Proctor (and others) thought the anthropomorphic idea was silly. Their attitude was that Riemann math was mathematics only, and it did not describe reality, and there could be no such things as little two-dimensional creatures living on a sphere and there could be no fourth dimension of three-dimensional “space.” The series of speculative articles that tried to anthropomorphitize Riemann geometry, and this Proctor critique (along with other critiques of that era), represent the beginning of the major paradigm change from “Classical Physics” to “Non-Classical Physics,” which picked up momentum early in the 20th Century.

Proctor’s 1884 article:
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-b...ABR0102-0160-6

The article begins at the bottom of the first column on page 228.

Gutenberg has a few. Over at Distributed Proofreaders we're going to be working on a bunch for Astronomy Day (16 April). I encourage folks to go over and check it out, get into the swing before the 16th I'm starting work on the Publications of the ASP, from Volume One.

Those are great links, thanks!

What I think would really be helpful today would be for people to translate some of the old classic papers from their original languages into English. Some of the best 19th Century papers are in German, French, and Italian and have never been translated into English, although they are often cited in science papers today. For example, Doppler’s “Uber das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einiger anderer Gestirne des Himmels” is often cited in science papers and books, but it is almost never actually quoted in science papers because almost no one has ever actually seen a copy of it. I’ve found that quite a lot of citations in books and papers today are obtained from earlier books and papers, and just because someone cites a 19th Century article today, such as the Doppler article, that doesn’t mean they’ve actually read it.

Pictorial Guide to the Moon by Dinsmoe Alter is very good for lunar astronomy.



It was published before the moonlandings so in the last two chapters it speculates. very interesting read.

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