Beautiful "coffee table" book. The author's love for the pictorial material in his collection and this book shows at every page. The author is at his best with the "post-Goddard" material and 20th century representations of space flight. Being the proud owner of some of the original, older material, I did notice that a couple of captions for Flammarion and Terzi are wrong but I am just being picky... Enjoy!

Collections are a mirror of the collector's soul, and Ordway's Visions of Spaceflight certainly does reveal one of his passions. He indulged this passion by traveling around the world collecting works of art and books related to space and space travel, ranging from the earliest works around 165 CE to the late 1900s. In college, he studied mining and petroleum geology, later shifting into rocket engineering and writing. He wrote several works with Werner von Braun, served as technical advisor to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and fed his soul by collecting. The book is visually impressive, with reproductions ranging from small to full-page in black and white or in color. The forward was written by Clarke. Ordway's very informative introduction traces his hunt for literature and art and discusses highlights in his various careers. The paintings and other pictures are annotated, giving the reader historical details as well as visual experience. One problem is the brittle binding, which may split if the book is carried around in a book bag; otherwise it is highly recommended for any space enthusiast's collection.

All of the paintings in this volume are dated, the paintings are for the most part not accurate as we see spaceflight today, but their historical value is immense. For example, early paintings of the lunar surface often exhibit sharp peaks on mountains, of course we now know eons of cosmic bombardment smoothly rounded most features. Text at the beginning of this book explain how these paintings were collected over many years, they date from before the 1600's to the 1950's, a fascinating story in itself, and there is also a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. Each painting is accompanied by a caption in this large-format book.

From our perspective today many of these paintings look very quaint, though when they were first published they must have appeared very futuristic. Buy this book for it's historical and art value, not for scientific accuracy.