The Wright Brothers Legacy: Orville and Wilbur Wright and Their Aeroplanes in Pictures

From Booklist
With the one-hundredth anniversary of powered flight, here's yet another book on the Wright brothers. What makes this one exceptional is the 250 illustrations--most of them photographs. The images were selected from a private collection, from the Library of Congress, and from Wright State University. The private collection belongs to Burton, who found and purchased the vintage estate prints of William Preston Mayfield, who began photographing the brothers in 1910. The photos show their early experiments with gliders, their 1903 flight, and their tours of European and American air shows. Others include one showing their sister and her friends sitting around a dining table, a view of the Wright family home taken from the street, the first glider, Orville flying while Wilbur runs alongside the plane, Orville with the king and queen of Spain, and the brothers with President Taft. This photographic record of their pioneering work in aviation is being published to coincide with The Wright Brothers Legacy, an exhibition organized by the Dayton Art Institute. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Book News, Inc.
Burton and Findsen have captured the extraordinary nature of the Wright Brothers' achievement in this handsome volume published to accompany an exhibition of the same name to be held at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio in 2003 (and at the Virginia Air & Space Center in 2003-2004). Filled with superb quality reproductions of historic photos, many from Burton's collection, the text chronicles in detail the brothers' development of the airplane and the fame and careers that followed.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Book Description
Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, this book is an in-depth photographic portrait of their monumental work in aviation--and the world's reaction to the invention of flight. From their early experiments with gliders to the first flight of heavier-than-air aircraft, from their tours of European and American air shows to their development of a military aircraft, to the final installation of the Kitty Hawk Flyer at the Smithsonian Institution in 1948, this book celebrates an invention that changed the world. Composed entirely of photographs of the brothers and their aircraft, as well as such memorabilia and souvenirs as vintage postcards, posters, stereopticon images, and toys, the images in this book are drawn from the most extensive Wright Brothers collection in private hands, which includes many examples by the Wright Brothers' personal photographer, William Preston Mayfield. Published here for the first time, this extraordinary collection will also be on view in an international traveling exhibition.

About the Author
A former photographer, Walt Burton is a collector and dealer in vintage photography, and the first person to exhibit the work of Ansel Adams in the Midwest. Owen Findsen is a writer and historian specializing in Ohio history. He was a features writer with the Cincinnati Enquirer for 35 years. Both authors live in Cincinnati.


Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

Published in collaboration with NASA (where editors Anthony Springer and Bertram Ulrich work, editors Goodyear and Roger Launius being associated with the Smithsonian Institution) and dedicated to the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia, Flight salutes 100 years of aviation progress. Overflowing with full-color and black-and-white photos, this handsome folio captures the many stages of flight as the flying machine has transmogrified from a fragile biplane into an aerial weapon and a high-tech vehicle capable of space exploration. But what really arrests the eye and the imagination are the eclectic works of art that the idealized conception of flight has inspired: poems such as Archibald MacLeish's "On the Beaches of the Moon," Robert Frost's "Kitty Hawk," and songwriter Joni Mitchell's "Amelia," paintings such as Robert Delaunay's Hommage Bleriot, Roy LaGrone's Woody Driver Black Birdman, and Andy Warhol's Moonwalk 1, and lyrics by songstress Judy Collins honoring the first woman Space Shuttle commander, Eileen Collins. The work concludes with a thoughtful summation on space exploration by commentator Walter Cronkite. Burton and Findsen (an independent collector and dealer in photography and an independent writer, respectively) offer a captivating pictorial retrospective of the Wrights' pioneering efforts, from their historic flight in 1903 to the final induction of the Flyer I at the Smithsonian in 1948, following Orville's death. The photographs are drawn from the former collection of William Preston Mayfield, the Wrights' personal photographer, and supplemented by other images from the Wright Collection at the Library of Congress and from the Wright Brothers archives at Wright State University. These rare photos form the basis of a touring exhibition originated by the Dayton Art Institute. Flight's strictly artistic focus may frustrate aviation enthusiasts, and though The Wright Brothers Legacy provides an unparalleled array of Wright images, its narrative is not as detailed or analytical as Tom Crouch and Peter Jakab's The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age. Nevertheless, both works are a visual feast and are highly recommended for all aviation collections and all libraries. [For more on the Wrights Brothers, see the review of Noah Adams's The Flyers, p. 99.-Ed.]-John Carver Edwards, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices