Ｏｎｌｉｎｅ Ｐｒｅｍｉｕｍ VVIP+++ The NASA Archives. 60 Years in Space by Piers Bizony,Roger Launius

TASCHEN (January 31, 2019)

The NASA Archives. 60 Years in Space by Piers Bizony,Roger Launius

The NASA Archives. 60 Years in Space by Piers Bizony,Roger Launius is A quick bit of background...I am a long time space exploration aficionado, have many books mostly to do with manned spaceflight in the 1960's. I have several other recent comparable large hard cover books featuring the manned space program including Moonshots, Moonfire, Full Moon and Apollo VII-XVII.The book....Starting with how this book is packaged - it literally comes (from Amazon anyway) triple boxed. You open the Amazon book, there's a slightly smaller book that is the shipping box for the book. You open that box, the book is inside a shrink-wrapped illustrated carrying case style box complete with handle typical for the largest, most lavish Taschen books. Carefully open the carrying case and this huge 15lb book inside is also shrink-wrapped. Everything graphically about this book is over-the-top. The dust cover and paper stock is thick semi-gloss paper, almost card stock. The dust cover and the chapter break photos have silver ink printing to accentuate the 4 color images. The actual book cover is an embossed photo of Buzz Aldrin's boot print on the lunar surface. The text is fairly large and easy to read. Binding, printing and overall quality of the photos and other images included is outstanding. Perhaps fortunately due to practicality issues, there's no fold-out spreads. This is *not* a book you can cradle in your lap and read, it's just too big and heavy.From a content standpoint, this book gives a very broad overview of American space program in a mostly chronological way. Informatively, this is the kind of book tailored more towards the casual space exploration fan. For the die-hard space enthusiast, almost all the photographs are fairly common, including iconic photos such as Ed White's spacewalk to the Apollo 11 moonwalk images to classic shuttle/spacewalk, ISS and of course, beautiful Hubble deep space photographs. There's also a few illustrations of hardware, missions, etc. The big draw here is the sheer size (most are full page images) and quality of the images included. IMO, I think content-wise, for so-called coffee table sized photo books, Moonshots and (the original full size HC) Full Moon books are a bit better and go a little more in depth but that is in large part because those book focus on the Apollo program itself. But big as those books are, they are physically dwarfed by "The NASA Archives."One thing I would caution potential buyers - be very careful when putting the book back in it's case and closing the top. It's very easy to catch the edge of and accidentally damaging the top of the dust cover.

The NASA Archives. 60 Years in Space by Piers Bizony,Roger Launius is Was really thrilled to find this book was double boxed and came in a protective sleeve, arrived in perfect condition. The book itself is massive and is of quality construction. All the photographs are incredible. Can’t wait to sit down and read every page.

The NASA Archives. 60 Years in Space by Piers Bizony,Roger Launius is Like the other reviewers, I have been a space buff since watching Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight (I was very upset at the time that the replays of the flight preempted my watching the latest Lone Ranger and Superman episodes). I have several large, hardcover books (such as Moonfire, also by Taschen), but nothing like this! The book is HEAVY-must weigh 10-15 lbs. and comes in a box with a carrying handle. I won't go into more details about opening or the description of the book as another reviewers have more ably done that. Suffice to say, the book is magnificent-worth the cost. For any serious fan of the space program, you can't go wrong having this book in your collection.

The NASA Archives. 60 Years in Space by Piers Bizony,Roger Launius is I have looked at many books of photographs from Apollo. The pictures in this book are spectacular.