July reading list special edition: books dedicated to the Moon

With a guide of over 300 pages and 500 illustrations, Paul Meuser examines every single mission from an unusual point of view, an architectural one. From the beginning of the Soviet and American space race, with the landing of Luna 2 in 1959 and the projects by the Russian architect and designer Galina Balashova, who designed the Soyuz capsule and the Salyut and Mir space stations, right up to the latest Chinese Chang’e 3 expedition. “What implications do these bizarre structures have for the future of architecture on other planets?”, asks the author. And he begins to examine the more recent goals of the SpaceX aerospace agency and NASA, who aim to land a man on Mars in the next 15 years.

The fifth book in the Canicola series dedicated to the children’s cartoon reverses the Earth-Moon relationship. Nuno, a young alien, the son of interstellar guardians who have left him to watch over the Moon, is the main character in the gentle story by Marino Neri. Accompanied only by four sleeping stone giants and in symbiosis with a dark matter flower, Nuno watches the Earth set. As he reflects on life and his thirst for adventure, he recalls the characters from a range of great works, such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s the Little Prince and JD Salinger’s young Holden Caulfield.

Written and illustrated by Zack Scott, a freelance designer and ex-aeronautical technician for the Royal Air Force, Apollo is the graphic account of the journey of the Apollo space programme. The London-based designer has concentrated on the tiniest details of this great adventure, setting out the less well-known facts. Such as the infographics, for example, that analyse a series of curiosities, such as weight in zero gravity, the signs inside the space vehicles and statistics on fuel consumption.

With a large-format book with almost 400 pages and 280 images, Mark Holborn tells of humankind’s exploration of space, from the first Neolithic observatories to the most recent and sophisticated telescopic and satellite images. This is Phaidon’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the landing on the moon of the Apollo 11 mission on 20 July 1969, and the fortieth anniversary of NASA’s geological exploration of the Moon.

A decade of tests and training, a staff of 400,000 including engineers and scientists, a budget of billions and the most powerful missile ever launched, watched live by millions of people all round the world. Of a Fire on the Moonis the account of the most epic event of the 20th century described with the words of a great narrator, Norman Mailer, an exceptional observer on a “mission” for LifeMagazine, who published his account in three parts between 1969 and 1970. Moonfire, published by Taschen in 2010, accompanies Mailer’s account with hundreds of photographs and maps from the NASA archives, magazines from the time and private collections. This year, the book has been re-published with a number of changes, such as captions from Apollo 11 experts, publications from the day and interviews with the astronauts following the mission.

Based on never-before-seen 70 mm footage and more than 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio recordings, the documentary Apollo 11, directed by Todd Douglas Miller, is an account of NASA’s most famous mission, catapulting the spectator into the midst of the activity in the days and hours leading up to the event.