Flight, Aviators, and Airplanes served as the theme for the April 2023 meeting. The books shown fell broadly into three groups: (1) books written by aviators, both fiction and nonfiction; (2) books written about aviators and aircraft; and, (3) fiction in which airplanes are central to the story.
The nonfiction books are listed in chronological order of the aviators' lives. The fiction is listed in the chronological order of the original publication date of each title.
Nonfiction
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| The Aerial Age |
Wellman, Walter. The
Aerial Age: A Thousand Miles by Airship Over the Atlantic Ocean: Airship
Voyages Over the Polar Sea: The Past, the Present and the Future of Aerial
Navigation. New York: A. R. Keller
& Co., 1911. Wellman's memoir
recounts his multiple attempts to reach the North Pole from 1906 to 1910. After two failed attempts by surface, he
tried to reach the terrestrial pole by airship.
He commissioned the building of an airship in Paris and made three
attempts to reach the North Pole in 1906, 1907, and 1909; each attempt proved
unsuccessful for a different reason. He then
commissioned a larger Paris-built airship and made another failed attempt in
1910. The Aerial Age closed the
book, so to speak, on Wellman's pursuits.
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| The Aerial Age |
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| Plate from The Aerial Age |
Nota bene: The North Pole was finally reached by airship on May 12, 1926, during the Amundsen-Ellsworth Transpolar Flight aboard an Italian-built airship, the Norge. Wellman was not part of that expedition.
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| Byrd's Great Adventure |
Miller, Francis Trevelyan. Byrd's Great Adventure. Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1930. Miller offers a contested biography of Richard E. Byrd, an American naval office, aviator, and polar explorer. Byrd claims to have reached both the North Pole and South Pole, though that claim is disputed by historians and experts. Byrd and Floyd Bennett attempted to fly over the North Pole on May 9, 1926, in a tri-motor monoplane (as illustrated on the cover of the book), but other aviators refuted their claim and explained how a monoplane could not have made the excursion within the documented timeframe. Calvin Coolidge nevertheless awarded Byrd and Bennett with the Tiffany Cross in 1927. Herbert Hoover later formally recognized Byrd's "successful flight over the South Pole;" a copy of Hoover's Presidential Message is shown in Miller's biography.
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| Hoover's Presidential Message |
Nota bene: As mentioned above, the airship Norge truly crossed over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, three days after Byrd's refuted attempt.
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| Rickenbacker |
Rickenbacker, Edward V. Rickenbacker. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967. First edition. Eddie Rickenbacker, a World War I American fighter pilot, was the most decorated United States flying ace with 26 aerial victories. This copy is inscribed by Rickenbacker on a blank preliminary page.
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| The Red Battle Flyer |
von Richthofen, Manfred Freiherr. The Red Battle Flyer. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1918. The first American edition in English of von Richthofen's autobiography. Translated by J. Ellis Barker, with a preface and notes by C. G. Grey, editor of "The Aeroplane." Captain von Richthofen, the World War I German fighter pilot known as the famous Red Baron, was considered the most successful fighter pilot of the war—the ace-of-aces—with 80 air combat victories.
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| The Red Battle Flyer |
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| I Could Never Be So Lucky Again |
Doolittle, James H. “Jimmy” with Carroll V. Glines. I Could Never Be So Lucky Again: An Autobiography by General James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle. New York: Bantam Books, 1991. In addition to his pioneering aviation accomplishments, Jimmy Doolittle commanded sixteen B-25 bombers on a long-range retaliatory air raid on Japanese main islands in 1942, known as the Doolittle Raid. This copy is multi-signed by Gen. Jimmy Doolittle and 9 Doolittle Raiders on tipped in cards.
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| Signatures by Jimmy Doolittle and the Doolittle Raiders |
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| The Aviators |
Groom, Winston. The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2013. Groom provides concise biographies of Rickenbacker, Doolittle, and Lindbergh, all race car drivers before being captivated by flight. Grooms show how each man in his own way contributed to both world wars by flying successful missions and how each aviator made other impacts on the history and development of flight.
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| Flying Fever |
Vincent, S. F. Flying Fever. London: Jarrolds, 1972. First British edition. Sir Stanley Vincent was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps and later the Royal Air Force. He is especially noteworthy because he was the only pilot to shoot down enemy aircraft in both world wars. This copy is inscribed by Vincent on the title page. Signed copies of this book are quite rare.
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| Wind, Sand and Stars |
de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine. Wind, Sand and Stars. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939. de Saint-Exupéry was a French writer and aviator from an aristocratic family. He was a commercial pilot who became a pioneer in international postal flight. He originally flew airmail flights from Europe to Africa. He later directed postal routes in South America; those experiences inspired his 1932 novel Night Flight (below). In 1935 during a Paris-to-Saigon air race, he and his mechanic-navigator crashed in the Sahara Desert, which formed the setting for his 1943 novella The Little Prince (below). Wind, Sand and Stars, his memoir, covers this period of his life.
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| The Pilot and the Little Prince |
Sís, Peter. The Pilot and The Little Prince: The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. This children's picture-book biography encompasses Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's childhood, passion for flying, and his experiences as a pilot including his commercial and military piloting. Sís also seeks to show the emotional side of de Saint-Exupéry as a pilot looking down at the earth from his plane, inspired by what he sees and the people he meets as he travels.
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| My True Course |
Dietz, Suzanne Simon. My True Course: Dutch Van Kirk, Northumberland to Hiroshima. Lawrenceville, GA: Red Gremlin Press, 2012. First edition. Dutch Van Kirk was the navigator of the Enola Gay, the plane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and is credited with bringing an end to World War II. This copy is inscribed by Van Kirk on a photo page.
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| To Fly and Fight |
Anderson, Clarence E. “Bud” with Joseph P. Hamelin. To Fly and Fight. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. First edition. Forward by Chuck Yeager. Col. "Bud" Anderson was a triple ace in World War II. Yeager was the first human to officially break the sound barrier in 1947 flying the experimental Bell X-1 at Mach 1. They flew missions together during the war. This copy is signed by both Anderson and Yeager on a limited-edition signature page tipped in to the first edition.
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| Signatures of Bud Anderson and Chuck Yeager |
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| Into the Unknown |
Rotundo, Louis. Into the Unknown: The X-1 Story. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1994. Foreword by Gen. Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager. The Bell X-1 was the first of the X-planes, experimental rocket planes designed to test supersonic technologies. An X-1, flown by Chuck Yeager, was the first piloted airplane to exceed the speed of sound in level flight in 1947. This copy is multi-signed by Chuck Yeager (x3), Chalmers “Slick” Goodlin, Pete Everest, Bob Hoover, Scott Crossfield, the author, and 8 other pilots and major X-1 program members.
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| Signatures by X-1 pilots and program members |
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| At the Edge of Space |
Thompson, Milton O. At the Edge of Space: The X-15 Flight Program. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1992. Foreword by Neil Armstrong. The North American X-15, a later X-plane designed to test new aerospace technologies, set altitude and speed records in the 1960s. In 1967, it flew at Mach 6.7, setting the record for the fastest speed achieved for a crewed aircraft, a record which remains unbroken. This copy is multi-signed by the author on tipped in card, and X-15 pilots Scott Crossfield, Pete Knight, Bill Dana, Joe Engle, and Robert White.
Fiction
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| Night Flight |
de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine. Night Flight. New York: The Century Co., 1932. de Saint-Exupéry draws from his own
experience as an airmail pilot in South America to craft Night Flight,
his second novel. The story follows the
brave men who pilot night mail planes among Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and Patagonia;
it was inspired by de Saint-Exupéry's real-life fellow airmail pilots. Night Flight was first published in
French as Vol de Nuit in 1931.
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| The Bear Fell Free |
Greene, Graham. The Bear Fell Free. London: Grayson & Grayson, 1935. Signed, limited edition. This copy is #81 of 285 signed, numbered copies, of which 250 were sold commercially. Twelve limited edition books were published in 1935 in the Grayson Books series, consisting of new, previously unpublished short stories by emerging and established authors.
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| Limitation page and Title page |
"The Bear Fell Free" was Greene's only attempt at absurdist fiction. The story focuses on the experience of a pilot who attempts to make the first flight across the Atlanta Ocean in a small airplane. The pilot becomes intoxicated before takeoff as he and his friends and family prematurely celebrate the accomplishment on the airstrip. Just as the pilot begins to taxi onto the runway, his wife or girlfriend—the story is unclear—tosses a teddy bear into the cockpit through an open window. His friends continue to celebrate on the runway after the pilot has flown out of sight. Later they wonder if he is yet over the Atlantic, so they contact air traffic control in Ireland only to learn that the plane was never spotted flying over the island. The inebriated pilot crashed into the Irish Sea at 120 miles per hour and was killed. Upon impact, the bear was dislodged from behind the pilot and fell free of the wreckage.
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| The Bear Fell Free |
This short story has never been reprinted outside of the Grayson & Grayson editions.
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| No Want of Meat, Sir! |
Hackney, John, ed. No Want of Meat, Sir. London: Grayson & Grayson, 1936. A short story anthology containing the twelve stories published separately in the Grayson Books series plus six stories not selected for the limited edition run. This scarce volume remains the only other publication of Greene's "The Bear Fell Free."
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| The Grayson Books |
Hackney, John, ed. The Grayson Books. London: Grayson & Grayson, c. 1937. Hackney, the series editor, took the extra signatures from of the twelve titles in the Grayson Books series, including the unsigned and unnumbered limitation pages, and bound them together in one volume. The book is unpaginated but consists of 600 pages, 130 of which are blank. The book does not contain any preliminary pages such as a title page, copyright page, table of contents, or introduction. It was issued without a dust jacket and not sold commercially.
The one-volume book was never actually published, and no
copies are recorded in any global library catalogues or similar databases. Only a half dozen copies or so may
exist. One copy, which sold at auction
in 2002, included a letter from Leonard Russell, an original recipient of one
of the copies, which read in part, "the editor, energiser and (possibly)
financial supporter of the whole thing was John Hackney... I think it must have
been in 1937 or 1938 that he put the series between two covers and gave me the
copy with my name stamped on the binding ̶ I
seem to remember that he had half a dozen of these individual blockings.''
The collector has identified four known copies; each bears
the name of the recipient stamped in gilt on the front cover. The recipients of the books were, at the
time, literary editors of various UK newspapers and magazines including The
Spectator, The Observer, the Sunday Times, and the Daily
Telegraph. It remains unclear why
Hackney gifted these editors with these books, especially two years after the
publication of the series.
The copy shown belonged to Derek Verschoyle, the literary editor of The Spectator and a friend of Greene.
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| The Bear Fell Free facsimile reprint |
Greene, Graham. The Bear Fell Free. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1977. Facsimile reprint of #239 of the Grayson Books limited edition (above). The Folcroft Press first published a reprint of 150 copies, sold exclusively to libraries, in 1970. In 1977, an unknown quantity was reprinted by the same printers then under the name Norwood Editions. The reprint, therefore, contains three title pages.
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| Norwood Edition reprint's title pages |
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| Le Petit Prince and The Little Prince |
de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine. The Little Prince. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2000. A new English translation by Richard Howard with restored original artwork by de Saint-Exupéry. The Little Prince is told by the narrator, a pilot who crashes his plane in the Sahara Desert, who meets a young boy known only as the little prince. Over the eight days the narrator needs to repair his plane, the little prince tells the narrator he is from another planet and recounts his life story and his travels to various other planets. The Little Prince was first published in 1943 in English and French.
de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine. Le Petit Prince. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2001. Uniform French edition released along with
the new English translation by Richard Howard, including the restored original
artwork by de Saint-Exupéry.
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| Catch-22 |
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961. First edition. Heller joined the US Army Air Corps in 1942 at the age of 19, and by 1944 served as a B-25 bombardier for the 488th Bombardment Squadron stationed on the Italian Front. Heller's novel's main character, Captain John Yossarian, is a B-25 bombardier in the fictional 256th US Army Air Squadron stationed on a Mediterranean Sea island west of Italy. While Catch-22 draws from Heller's personal experience in World War II, it is not autobiographical fiction and the story's antihero, Yossarian, is not Heller. Heller flew 60 combat missions as a bombardier, whereas Yossarian devises multiple strategies to avoid combat missions. Reflecting on the war later in life, Heller remembered the war as "fun in the beginning... You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it." Heller "felt like a hero" on his return home. Yossarian, on the other hand, does not view the war as fondly, and he constantly battles the military bureaucracy in attempts to get out of the service. Yossarian yearns, more than anything, to get home, the one trait he may share with his author.
