1903: William H Pickering: A Photographic Atlas of the Moon. Harvard College Observatory. First (?) photographic atlas to include latitude and longitude grid.

1903: Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1941-1906): A Comparison of the Features of the Earth and the Moon, Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge. Much better photos than in Pickering’s Atlas, and a better understanding of geologic processes, but he was wrong in believing the lunar craters were volcanic.

1906: Julius Franz: Der Mond. A small book, little noticed outside of Germany, with solid text and sketch map.

1909: Philip Fauth: The Moon in Modern Astronomy - Poorly illustrated rant of a book by a master draftsman who thought glaciers existed on the Moon.

1913: Mary Blagg: Collated List of Lunar Formations. The first attempt to compile and systematize past lunar nomenclatures.

1929: GP Serviss: The Story of The Moon. Popular level book on the Moon at a time when few people were interested. Presented as a series of private tutorials to a young lady “of charming intelligence” who wished to be “intellectually entertained”. Frightfully boring in places! Price in early 1998 - $45.

1931: Walter Goodacre: The Moon: with a Description of its Surface Formations.- Best observer’s book of the Moon, privately printed and thus rare.

1932: Philip Fauth: Neue Mondkarten und neue Grundlagen einer Mondkunde aufe 16 Tafeln (New Moon Map and New ?? in 16 Tables). A rarely seen Moon Atlas.

1934: F Chemla-Lamech (1894-1962) - Etude Monographique des plus grandes Formations Lunaires. The beginning of an apparently incomplete series of regional studies and drawings of the Moon.

1935: WH Wesley and Mary Blagg: Map of the Moon - Until the 1960s this was the official map of the International Astronomical Union; it is one of the ugliest maps of the last 200 years. Although the positions are accurate, the drawing of craters is painfully poor.

1935: Mary Blagg & Karl Muller: Named Lunar Formations -The catalog of craters accompanying the Map of the Moon.

1935: Fred E Wright (-1954): “The surface features of the moon.” Scientific Monthly 40, 101-115. This is one of the few results from the Committee on Study of the Surface Features of the Moon, chaired by Wright. This committee of prominent astronomers and geologists, funded by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC, worked sporadically from 1925 until the outbreak of WWII. Their most famous product was a small number of lunar globes, created by developing the photographic image of a telescopic moon photo which had been projected onto and around a glass sphere coated by photographic emulsions. The Lunar & Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona has one of these remarkable globes.

1936: Philip Fauth: Unser Mond: Our Moon is a 600 page compendium - the largest Moon book ever? - of Fauth’s nearly 60 years of observing. It is rare, but I finally found a copy. It is strange that no later authors appear to have used it.

1930s: R Hayward & C Gruenfeld: Lunar model on display at Griffith Observatory, Los Angeles, California. Shows only a portion of the Moon, but at high resolution. Info from Fisher (1943, p. 125).

1940s: R Hayward & C Gruenfeld: Lunar hemisphere. Six foot hemisphere made by sculptors Hayward & Gruenfeld was (still is?) on display at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Topography was based on 5000 measured positions and was so accurate that it appeared to be a photo. A bright light moved its beam across the model surface duplicating the changing phases. Info from Fisher (1943, p. 123-4).

1943: Clyde Fisher: The Story of the Moon. A popular book that shows up frequently in used book shops. It was one of the first lay books to promote the impact origin of lunar craters and to describe meteorite craters on Earth.

1944-9: Josiah Edward Spurr (1870-1950): Geology Applied to Selenology - Most thorough, boring and wrong geological interpretation of the Moon before Apollo. The four volume set includes (1948) Lunar Catastrophic History, which was offered by a secondhand bookseller in early 1998 for the immensely unreasonable price of $250. The first volume, The Imbrium Plain Region of the Moon was offered in 1998 for $100 - about 20 times what I paid for it a decade earlier!

1949: Ralph Belknap Baldwin (b. 1912): The Face of the Moon - The most important lunar book since Beer & Madler - proved impact origin of lunar craters; 50 years later it is still nearly all right!

1949: Robert S Dietz (-1997): “The meteorite impact origin of the Moon’s surface features” in Journal of Geology 54, New Haven. An independent defense of the impact origin of craters; strangely the author never published anything else about the Moon, but did become a world expert on terrestrial impact craters.

1951: Hugh Percy Wilkins: 300″ Map of the Moon (published at 100″)

1952: A Fresca: La Luna. A little known popular book on the Moon in Italian.

1952: Harold C Urey: The Planets - Their Origin & Development. A book that gave credibility to study of the Moon and planets because Urey was already a Nobel Prize winner and he vigorously addressed many problems with a rigorous physical and chemical perspective; even so much of what he wrote about the Moon was wrong.

1953: Patrick Moore: A Guide to the Moon. The first(?) of numerous books by popularizer Patrick Moore - it introduced many who later became scientists to the Moon. Offered in 1999 for $35 and, with great delusions, $62.50 (the cheaper copy was actually in better condition)!

1953: Thomas Elger: Elger’s Map of the Moon. This clear and clean map had been a standard for decades when it was revised in 1953 by H.P. Wilkins. Unfortunately, it was later (1980s) “improved” with the addition of a mis-registered green hue, becoming useless, but the 1953 edition is excellent.

1954: Gerard Peter Kuiper (1905-1973): On the origin of lunar surface features. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 41. Based on visual observations with the MacDonald Observatory 82″ telescope, first principles of physics, and Baldwin’s arguments for impact origins of lunar craters, Kuiper deduced that the early Moon had melted forming a low density crust (exactly the same idea for the origin of the anorthosite crust deduced from Apollo 11 samples). Kuiper also made various other correct interpretations, but some were based on his incorrect understanding of geology!

1954: Hugh Percy Wilkins: Our Moon - An easy introduction to the Moon when the idea of going into space was still science fiction.

1955: Hugh Percy Wilkins & Patrick Moore: The Moon - The most comprehensive of the traditional amateur observer’s books about the Moon. For sale for $45 in 1998.

1958: Hastings, Nebraska 10 ft diameter Moon globe entrance way dedicated.

1958: Proceedings of the Lunar & Planetary Exploration Colloquim - the first regular meetings about the Moon and planets.

1959: Author unknown: A little known map of charm.

1959, Jan.: Luna 1 - first lunar flyby (but meant to hit it) and first human-made satellite of the Sun (F).

1959, Sep.: Luna 2 - first contact with the Moon; probe crashed - as planned - near Archimedes (C).

1959, Oct: Luna 3 - first photos (very poor) of the farside (F).

1959: Val A Firsoff: Strange World of the Moon - Strange world of amateur musing about the Moon, complete with lunar vegetation. Offered for sale in 1998 for $17.50.