Not long after the Wright brothers took flight in 1903, books about the high fliers of early aviation began to appear, targeting young readers with titles such as Bird Boys and Boy Scouts of the Air in 1912. Then, after Charles Lindbergh famously jumped the pond in 1927, sales of aviation adventure tales really started to soar. Dorothy Dixon Earns Her Wings, published in 1933,was among the first to encourage girls to reach for the skies.

Special Collections in the Mary Couts Burnett Library has launched a web exhibit spotlighting the vintage children’s aviation books that are part of the Erisman-Odom collection.

“Nowhere is Americans’ love for technology in the first half of the 20th century more obvious than in the books they gave their children,” says Fred Erisman, a specialist in American popular culture and literature who taught at TCU for 35 years.

Erisman, the former Charles A. Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum and author of the book From Birdwomen to Skygirls, notes that between 1900 and 1950, more than 80 technically oriented series, comprising over 600 volumes, were written for readers between the ages of 10 and 16. Of these, more than 350 deal in some way with aviation.

On the Web:
To view the exhibit, go to www.library.tcu.edu/spcoll/web-exhi/skies.htm.