by:
Gimbel, Richard

Publisher:
University of Washington Press
Published:October 1, 2000
ISBN:0295978112
Format:Hardcover
Pages:372

Description: From Booklist
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
Copyright # American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Description:
The Genesis of Flight illustrates one of the most prestigious aeronautical history collections in existence, covering the history of man's dream of flight from antiquity to the advent of powered flight at the beginning of the 20th century. The items included are drawn from more than 20,000 objects that vividly reflect both humanity's vision and its fulfillment.

Five-thousand-year-old seals carved from semiprecious stones and used to inscribe clay tablets record the earliest conception of flight. Among the collection's thousands of books are priceless volumes printed before 1501. Many, such as Robert Hooke's Philosophical Collections (1682), are serious, scientific studies of the possibility of flight. Others are about imaginary voyages into space and to other worlds, including Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1547), Cyrano de Bergerac's account of a voyage to the moon first published in 1650, and, of course, the 19th-century classics of Jules Verne. More than 2,000 prints, portraits, engravings, etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs comprise a unique and arresting pictorial history of aeronautics. Important letters written by pioneers of flight-Montgolfier, Blanchard, Lunardi, Lilienthal, Count von Zeppelin, Santos-Dumont, Langley, and the Wright brothers-are to be found among the collection's manuscript holdings. There are also rare commemorative medallions, sheet music, posters, dime novels, postcards and postage stamps, early flight manuals, catalogues of aircraft equipment, match boxes, and children's games and toys-all recording, in one way or another, humanity's aspirations to fly.

The collection was assembled by Richard Gimbel (1898-1970), who began collecting while serving with the 8th U.S. Army Air Force in England during World War II, and continued after becoming curator of aeronautical literature at Yale University. The collection was donated to the United States Air Force Academy upon his death.

The contributors include Tom D. Crouch, National Air and Space Museum; Clive Hart, University of Essex, England; Paul Maravelas, University of Minnesota Libraries; Ellen Morris, University of Pennsylvania; Dominick A. Pisano, National Air and Space Museum; Holly Pittman, University of Pennsylvania; and Edward Rochette, American Numismatics Association.