Apollo in Photographs books

[woods170]

Kluger's new book on Gemini was released this week. I'm awaiting my copy.

The author of the Apollo 1 and 7 books has announced plans for the next ones. I'll find the post, but I believe he announced Apollos 8, 10 and 11. He's probably also doing Apollo 9, although I need to check.

Ed Hengeveld is a well-known Dutch collector of spaceflight images, and he's a member of this forum as well btw. He's involved with this series of books (see his name on the cover of the Apollo 1 and Apollo 7 books), and he recently wrote an article for the "Ruimtevaart" (spaceflight) magazine of the "Nederlandse Vereniging voor Ruimtevaart" (NVR - Dutch Spaceflight Society).

In that article he made it clear that the three of them (Pickering, Bisney and Hengeveld) intend to complete a series of twelve photo books (for Schiffer Publishing); one book for each of the crewed Apollo missions:
- Apollo 1 in photographs
- Apollo 7 in photographs
- Apollo 8 in photographs
- Apollo 9 in photographs
- Apollo 10 in photographs
- Apollo 11 in photographs
- Apollo 12 in photographs
- Apollo 13 in photographs
- Apollo 14 in photographs
- Apollo 15 in photographs
- Apollo 16 in photographs
- Apollo 17 in photographs

The first two of these have been in book stores since earlier this year and the third (Apollo 8 in photographs) is arriving in book stores this month.

Ed also reported that they have completed not just the Apollo 8 book, but the one for Apollo 9 as well. They are currently working on the Apollo 10 photo book. Their goal is to complete two of these Apollo photo books each year, wrapping up the series in 2030. Which btw should be just in time for humanities crewed return to the lunar surface (regardless of that being someone from China or the USA).

And the trio (Pickering, Bisney and Hengeveld) are even considering continueing this photobook format for the crewed Gemini and/or Skylab missions.

[Steve G]

I just received the Apollo 7 book and it looks fantastic, though I have six defective pages where they have been printed twice, so they are superimposed with another page. I don't know the source of the TV still frames came from, but I've never seen videos of the TV transmissions close to that quality.

[Blackstar]

I just received the Apollo 7 book and it looks fantastic, though I have six defective pages where they have been printed twice, so they are superimposed with another page. I don't know the source of the TV still frames came from, but I've never seen videos of the TV transmissions close to that quality.

Thank you for that. Please post additional comments if you have them. I'm thinking about asking Santa for the books for Christmas.

[woods170]

I just received the Apollo 7 book and it looks fantastic, though I have six defective pages where they have been printed twice, so they are superimposed with another page. I don't know the source of the TV still frames came from, but I've never seen videos of the TV transmissions close to that quality.

Thank you for that. Please post additional comments if you have them. I'm thinking about asking Santa for the books for Christmas.

OK, I'll oblige.

For the Apollo 1 book...

First impression: sturdy, decently-sized, well-bound hardcover photo book.

Physical dimensions (Metric... I don't care for that American or Imperial cr@p)
- Height: 28.7 cm
- Width: 22.5 cm
- Thickness: 2.8 cm (so, slightly over one 1 inch thick)
- Weight: 1.68 kg

Dust jacket: present and has the exact same print as the hardcover

Paper: heavy quality, glossy, extremely suitable for the many images in the book.

Text: Serif
Headers: Sans Serif

Number of images: well over 500

Images variety: the more publically known Apollo 1 images are there, but the real treasure of this book is that it contains a metric sh!t-ton of images that are rarely or never seen.

Text accompanying the images: generally well-researched and enjoyable to read. However, the text with a handful of images contains factual errors. That won't bother the general public, but nerds like me will notice them.

Print quality of images: very good. Pickering, Bisney and Hengeveld have taken great care to select the very best images and make sure the colors are correctly adjusted over the entire set. As is usual with Pickering, Bisney and Hengeveld, the images are free of blemishes, dust, scratches. They are well restored.

Most pages contain 2 images, with several containing 3 images. About 10 pages contain 1 image.

Contents:
- Foreword (1 page)
- Introduction (2 pages)
- Acknowledgements (1 page)
- Chapter 1 - The Astronauts (20 pages)
- Chapter 2 - January 1965-May 1966 (20 pages)
- Chapter 3 - June-July 1966 (16 pages)
- Chapter 4 - Launch Complex 34 (12 pages)
- Chapter 5 - August-September 1966 (32 pages)
- Chapter 6 - October 1966 (34 pages)
- Chapter 7 - November-December 1966 (14 pages)
- Chapter 8 - January 3-10, 1967 (20 pages)
- Chapter 9 - January 17, 1967 (18 pages)
- Chapter 10 - January 27-31, 1967 (24 pages)
- Chapter 11 - January 31 - July 1967 (36 pages)
- Epilogue (11 pages)
- Abbreviations (1 page)
- Bibliography (2 pages)
- Index (3 pages)

Total of 272 pages.

Overall:
I consider this book to be very good value for money. I spent 41 Euros (~ $47) on it at Dutch/Belgian online retailer bol.com

[Blackstar]

Somebody just tweeted some pics from the Apollo 8 book:

[Blackstar]

https://thespacereview.com/article/5119/1

[Blackstar]

I just got the Apollo 1 book from Santa, but have not spent any time going through it. I plan to do so. But I was surprised to see a bunch of photos of the funeral. I'm glad they included them.

As I have written before, so often photo editors use the same photos that have been used over and over again. If you pull out a dozen photo-heavy space books printed in the 1970s and 1980s, you will almost certainly see the same photos reprinted across several books. The same handful of photos from each mission. That's often because most photo editors know little about the subject, so they will look at previous books (not the original film positives) and say "I want this one, I want this other one..." Also, it's because, to be honest, the best photos are the ones that got printed first and reprinted. But that doesn't mean that those were the only good photos. It was not until the 1990s when a few people outside and inside NASA started looking at the original negatives that other images started showing up. And more recently some photo experts have been taking even some of the badly exposed originals and doing amazing things to bring out the details.

[Blackstar]

Photos from the Apollo 8 book.

[Blackstar]

Emily Carney has a review:

https://nss.org/three-men-many-futures-apollo-1-in-photographs-reviewed/

[Blackstar]

I have now acquired all three books, and although I have not done anything more than page through them in a few minutes, my preliminary assessment is that they're pretty amazing. There are all kinds of photos in there that not only have you not seen before, but you never even thought about before. For example, there are photos showing the assembly of the launch escape system. Lots of construction and astronaut training photos. It's an incredible collection.

Paper quality and photo reproduction quality are excellent.

I'm sure I'll comment more later. I hope that future books include more photos of hardware construction as well as things like recovery operations. They will certainly get a bit repetitive after awhile, but I think that the authors know the photographic material better than anybody. So they'll know what is out there.

[Blackstar]

I need to spend a lot more time going through these books. I briefly went through the Apollo 8 one yesterday and took photos of some random pages. You can see how many amazing photos there are of things you have never seen before--like the spacecraft being rolled out on a trailer, or the water deluge system being tested at the pad. They really are fantastic, and I'm somebody who is not easily impressed anymore.