This work contains beautiful color illustrations of various natural phenomena, including icebergs, waterspouts, and glaciers. Its publisher, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, was founded in 1698 as an arm of the Church of England. The Society produced not only theological books but also works on popular science, travel, biography, and fiction.

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This charming early children’s book celebrates a voyage on a zeppelin, from the Old World to the New.

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Gart der Gesundheit is one of the first printed herbals to be published in a vernacular language instead of Latin. Herbals combined folklore and home remedies, information from classical sources, and religious symbolism into a popular mix of botanical and medical advice. Because text and woodcut images were often copied from earlier works, rather than drawn from nature, herbals became increasingly imprecise over time. While some illustrations remain identifiable, even charming to the modern eye, others are unrecognizable, frustrating both contemporaries and modern researchers.

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Assembled by an unknown enthusiast, this scrapbook on the subject of early attempts at flight includes articles and images of the first balloon ascensions. It also contains old aerial maps, which scholars find useful for the study of architecture, history, and urban development.

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On July 21, 1969, the Apollo XI Lunar Module Eagle landed in the southwest corner of the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility. The crew consisted of Flight Commander Neil Armstrong, Col. Edwin Aldrin, and Lt. Col. Michael Collins, who later became the first director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. All members of the crew autographed this copy.

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In Baker’s fanciful speculation about traveling to the moon in a dirigible, the travelers show no ill effects from their exposure to the cold vacuum of space. In fact, they appear to be greatly enjoying their expedition. The Bella Landauer collection of aeronautical sheet music at the National Air and Space Museum Library vividly conveys the general public’s great enthusiasm for manned flight and other scientific achievements.

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This children’s book tells the story of the stray dogs made famous by the dubious honor of being the first animals launched into space. In addition to capturing the flavor of the times, children’s books like this one are important to researchers studying the cultural history of space flight.

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Printed paper instruments called volvelles provided astronomers with the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets, freeing them from performing lengthy calculations derived from planetary tables. Bassantin’s work, a general overview of astronomy, partly copies Petrus Apianus’s Astronomicum Cæsareum of 1540. The Irish astronomer William Molyneux (1656-98) once owned this copy.

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Fascinated by entomology since childhood, Englishman Henry W. Bates traveled with naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace to Brazil in 1848. He stayed for 11 years, collecting butterflies and other insects in the Amazon rain forest. Despite ill health and unimaginable difficulties, he collected specimens of more than 10,000 animal species, 8,000 of which were new to Western science.

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Pop-up books are an old printer’s technique used to surprise and charm the reader by breaking the surface of the page. A number of pop-up books in the 1930s re-created popular fairy tales and comic strips. In this episode from the beloved science-fiction comic strip Buck Rogers, Buck’s friends Buddy and Allura battle insect-like space aliens.

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The two-volume magnum opus of Mark Catesby is the product of one man’s dedication and effort, from his years of travel and research to his hand-coloring of the printed plates (which he learned to etch himself so as to implement his own technique for indicating feathers). Eighteenth-century classifier Carolus Linnaeus cited more than a hundred of his species descriptions, and the book is the first fully illustrated work on the flora and fauna of southeastern North America. Plants and animals often are grouped in their natural associations, and the folio format allowed many species to be depicted lifesize.

The Smithsonian Libraries holds a magnificent copy of the first edition, complete with the rare prospectus and the advertisement for the Appendix, in a contemporary full-leather binding. The book has a distinguished provenance that traces back to the Abdy family, noted for its support of natural history publications in 18th-century England, and more recently to noted ornithology-book collector Evan Morton Evans (1870-1955).

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Many of Clyne’s colorful pop-up books center on the adventures of the Jump-Ups, a typical American family of the 1950s. In this book, one of a collection of nearly 600 pop-up and books with moveable parts donated to the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Library in the 1980s, the Jolly Jump-Ups journey to Mars, where they encounter friendly aliens.

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James Cook’s voyages initiated the modern era of scientific exploration. Establishing a model for future expeditions, his three voyages had an explicitly scientific rather than political purpose, carrying artists and naturalists who brought back large collections of plants, animals, and artifacts from the regions visited. In his second voyage (1772-75), considered by many the most remarkable voyage ever, Cook circumnavigated the world at the Antarctic Circle with the help of a chronometer, a new instrument that enabled him to determine his ship’s longitude accurately.

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Edward S. Curtis, a professional photographer in Seattle, devoted his life to documenting what was perceived to be a vanishing race. His monumental publication presented to the public an extensive ethnographical study of numerous tribes, and his photographs remain memorable icons of the American Indian. The Smithsonian Libraries holds a complete set of his work, donated by Mrs. Edward H. Harriman, whose husband had conducted an expedition to Alaska, with Curtis as photographer, in 1899.

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Dutton’s geological studies of the southwestern American plateaus provided brilliant interpretations of the physical structures of the Grand Canyon region. The oversized volume of maps and panoramas that accompanies his monograph on the region includes three double-page tinted lithographs which together form this 180-degree view, as seen perhaps by the men sketching on the canyon’s northern rim (lower left).

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Fantastical monsters were a common feature of medieval bestiaries, which derived from classical texts of the second to fourth centuries A.D. The bestiary incorporated oral traditions, travelers’ tales, Christian symbolism, and allegory into a compendium of moralizing tales based on animals familiar, exotic, and sometimes imaginary. Copied and recopied in manuscript form over a thousand years, these texts became more varied and elaborate when printed versions proliferated in the late 1400s. The genre as a whole, however, was soon superceded by the more scientific works of the Renaissance.

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Travelers sailed into the sky for the first time in hot-air balloons. Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier -- brothers, papermakers, and early experimenters in balloon flight -- organized the first manned public ascension, piloted by Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes, in 1783. Faujas de Saint-Fond’s account and description of their exploits was reprinted often, and the work is still consulted in studying the advent of aeronautics. The Smithsonian Libraries has both volumes of the first edition in fine condition, a rare combination.

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Among the song’s predictions of things to come is routine air travel in hot air balloons. The traffic is terrible! The Bella Landauer collection of aeronautical sheet music at the National Air and Space Museum Library vividly conveys the general public’s great enthusiasm for manned flight and other scientific achievements.

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This hand-tinted lithograph is part of a portfolio purporting to illustrate the "discovery of life on the moon." In 1836, Richard E. Locke, writing for the New York Sun, claimed that the noted British astronomer Sir William Herschel had discovered life on the moon. Flora and fauna included bat-men, moon maidens (with luna-moth wings), moon bison, and other extravagant life forms. Locke proposed an expedition to the moon using a ship supported by hydrogen balloons.

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Although the magnetic lodestone had been used since ancient Greek times, Gilbert’s work contains the first experimental research on the properties of magnetism. Gilbert argued, correctly, that the Earth is a natural magnet and that the Earth’s magnetic poles are relatively near its geographic poles. As a result, mariners were better able to use the lodestone as an effective navigational tool.

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The tale of "Wrong Way" Corrigan - who set out for California and landed in Ireland!

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William Henry Holmes, American geologist, anthropologist, artist, and museum director, was the first director of the Smithsonian's art collection--now the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), which holds more than 60 of Holmes's art works in its collection. Contained in 16 volumes and a number of boxes, Random Records of a Lifetime is, in Holmes's own words, "the great accumulation of unfinished work. My files were burdened with no end of diaries, field notes, and unpublished papers covering a period of 60 years . . ."

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Kelly wrote the only authorized biography of the Wright brothers. George C. Page, an aeronautical engineer, sent his copy to prominent figures, especially from early aviation and space flight, for their autographs, with the intention of donating the book to the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian. Among the signatures are those of Charles Lindbergh and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

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Navigators for Columbus would have taken the Alfonsine tables, a set of astronomical tables, on their expeditions to the New World. Once thought to have been devised by astronomers at the court of Alfonso X, the tables were extremely useful to navigators and crucial to early explorers. Because the tables considerably simplified astronomical calculations, the user could determine planetary positions without having to work with the underlying mathematical models that described the Ptolemaic solar system.

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A man of intense curiosity, Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher pursued research in geography, language, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. He authored more than 40 books, including Mundus subterraneus, perhaps the earliest printed work on geophysics and vulcanology. Recent earthquakes and the 1630 eruption of Mount Vesuvius prompted Kircher’s interest. To satisfy his inquisitiveness, he climbed Vesuvius and was lowered by a rope into the crater. In this book, he speculated on the nature of phenomena that occur below the Earth’s surface, and explained and illustrated the origins of fossils, hot springs, and volcanoes.

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Samuel Pierpont Langley-- third Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who developed the Smithsonian Observatory and the early National Zoo-- was also the inventor of the Aerodrome, an early flying machine that rivaled the Wright Flyer. As early as 1896, Langley built a steam-driven aircraft that flew unmanned, an appropriate accomplishment for the man who would usher the Institution and its library into the 20th century.

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The lyrics wonder about the possibility of powered, controlled flight in 1903, surprisingly the same year that the Wright brothers made their historic first flight. The Bella Landauer collection of aeronautical sheet music at the National Air and Space Museum Library vividly conveys the general public’s great enthusiasm for manned flight and other scientific achievements.

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Battling careless handling, rot, bugs, and inadvertent damage, European scientists and collectors exercised considerable ingenuity in getting specimens home intact and in keeping them safe for study once there. In 1772, Lettsom, a British physician who had a private natural history museum and botanical garden, produced one of the earliest and most handsome manuals on collecting, preparing, transporting, and preserving scientific specimens. Charles W. Richmond, a Smithsonian ornithologist and bibliographer, acquired this book in the early 1900s.

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On May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh completed the first nonstop solo air crossing of the Atlantic, in 33 hours and 39 minutes. Lindbergh, who flew in a customized single-engine Ryan monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, signed this copy, one from an edition of a thousand.

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Olaus Magnus (Olav Stov), a Swedish bishop who traveled widely in Scandinavia and Europe during the mid-1500s, compiled the first major work on the peoples, geography, economy, and fauna of northern Europe. Olaus Magnus intended his work, first published in Latin (Rome, 1555), to be an explication of his great map of the lands of the north, which he created in 1539. Woodcuts show northern peoples, including Lapps and Finns, engaged in their daily occupations, which were no doubt exotic and strange to southern Europeans. The volume also includes some of the first illustrations of whaling, and readers may have readily accepted as real the various fantastical monsters depicted throughout the popular and widely translated book.

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This remarkable travel account by an agent of the Dutch East India Company details the culture, landscape, peoples, architecture, festivals, and cities of 17th-century China. During the age of exploration and imperialism by Western powers in the Far East, Europeans craved information on exotic lands, and this book profoundly affected them. Designers copied its illustrations of Chinese ornament and used them as inspiration for creating decorative objects and furniture.

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Page persuaded more than 1,050 men and women -- all notable for their roles as pilots, aircraft designers and engineers, support personnel, or flight crews during the first 50 years after the invention of the airplane -- to autograph his copy of The Wright Brothers. The index lists the signers alphabetically by last name, with the corresponding page number in the Kelly book where each autograph can be found.

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Peale, the youngest son of American artist Charles Willson Peale, was one of the naturalists appointed to the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-42. Because Charles Wilkes, the expedition’s leader, objected to parts of Peale’s report, and other naturalists criticized his taxonomic nomenclature, Peale’s volume was suppressed shortly after it was published. Peale’s plates survive in the official expedition report by John Cassin, which also quotes Peale’s field observations at length. The Smithsonian Libraries holds two copies of Peale’s extremely rare work, all in their original bindings.

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Naturalis historia is the most thorough zoological and botanical treatise known from the ancient world. Gaius Plinius Secundus, a well-traveled military officer of the Roman Empire and a naturalist, attempted to record all knowledge of the world and nature, preserving that written by earlier authors and adding to it from his own observations. A man of intense curiosity, he died after venturing too close to the erupting Mount Vesuvius. The 1582 edition, with woodcuts by artists Jost Amman and Hans Weidlitz, is one of the few illustrated versions among the 15 editions (published from 1469 to 1800) that are held in the Smithsonian Libraries.

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A young girl dreams of a balloon journey into space. The Bella Landauer collection of aeronautical sheet music at the National Air and Space Museum Library vividly conveys the general public’s great enthusiasm for manned flight and other scientific achievements.

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Claudius Ptolemaeus, an astronomer and mathematician living in Alexandria, Egypt, summed up the geography of his known world -- essentially the Roman Empire -- in the second century A.D. He systematically listed the latitudes and longitudes of some 8,000 places in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and described methods of projection for drawing maps. Ptolemy’s work represented a major advance in the science of mapmaking and, despite its errors, retained its authority for almost 1,400 years. The 1511 edition is the first to include a bit of North America in the world map.

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Schedel, a Nuremberg doctor, compiled an illustrated chronicle embracing the period from the creation of the world to the end of the 15th century. In addition to text, the "Nuremberg Chronicle" contains 1,800 images based on more than 600 woodcuts. The Liber chronicarum remains an astonishing publishing feat, barely 50 years after the invention of print from moveable type.

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Long before men entered space, writers and artists imagined such expeditions. Jules Verne’s classic science-fiction work on space flight first appeared in English in 1874. His novel remains of interest not only to researchers studying the cultural history of space flight but also to bibliophiles comparing the various editions of Verne’s books.

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In the spirit of exploration and inquiry that began to emerge in Europe in the late 1500s, individuals of means took to assembling collections of curiosities. Some served as aids in classifying all known plants and animals. Among its varied holdings, the natural history collection of Dutch merchant Levin Vincent contained skeletons and skins, animals preserved in alcohol, and plants dried and pressed on paper. These same items, along with books, remain the core materials of taxonomy and systematics, fields of research that continue today at the Smithsonian.

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Breydenbach’s account of his 1483 pilgrimage to the Holy Land is thought to be the first printed travel book to contain illustrations. Fellow traveler Erhard Reuwich, the first painter known to have published a book, created its fine hand-colored woodcuts. His illustrations include the first use of panoramas to depict cities. Panoramas, enlivened by great detail, became a popular illustrative form in early printed books.

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During the 1830s, the United States asserted itself in the economic and scientific exploration of the Pacific, including the western coast of North America. Lt. Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, led the first official scientific expedition to the region in 1838. For five years, navigators, scientists, naturalists, and artists explored areas from Alaska to Antarctica. The materials they collected, which are preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, are still invaluable for the study of the peoples, animals, plants, and geography of the eastern Pacific Ocean.

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Zeiller, an Austrian cartographer, dedicated this four-volume survey of the provinces and towns of France to its king, Louis XIV. (It was part of an extensive geographic survey of many European countries.) The volume containing his 300 illustrations is one of the period's finest examples of hand-colored engraving. The finely rendered pictures preserve many details of buildings, roadways, and cities that no longer exist or have been significantly altered. Topographia is an excellent example of the art of the book in 17th-century France and one of the most comprehensive contemporary guides to its cities and structures.

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