Apollo: VII – XVII

This book hit me on two levels, space and photography, and both parts were well presented.

I was a "space geek" in the 1960s, totally immersed in the manned space flight programs as they culminated with Apollo. I read everything, watched all of the T.V. broadcasts (only 3 channels back then), and had pictures of astronauts on my walls rather than sports figures. Living in central Florida, I watched every Saturn V launch from my backyard.

So now, almost 50 years since we left earth orbit, I bought this book.
Everything I read in Life Magazine, and watched on tiny CRT T.V. sets back then did not prepare me for the beauty of this book. It is well laid out, chronologically. There is a small narrative about each mission's goals as well as the crew biography. But it is about the photos.... and many are terrific. The astronauts were not artists, they were scientific daredevils, but with some basic training about f-stops and shutterspeeds, they captured views that no others have ever seen before... and on film, no rear LCD to make sure they got the shot. To be sure, they got the shots!

The back of the book has a section on the cameras and lenses as well as training the astronauts received to be photojournalists, which will be of great interest to photography nuts (like me).

Physically, the book is fantastic. If you don't have one, buy a coffee table to display it.

I have several other similar large format books featuring the Apollo and 1960's manned spaceflight photography. This one compares very favorably to the best including "Moon Shots," "Full Moon" and "Moon Fire." In fact, it's a great compliment to "Moon Shots" as there's not a lot of duplication of mission photos between the two books.

Physically, the book is about 10 3/4 inches square, over 320 pages (almost 1 1/2 inches thick) printed on heavy stock matte paper. Every individual mission photo occupies a full page with several 2 page spreads and the reproduction, print and binding quality is excellent. A nice touch is the lettering on the cover and spine is in metallic gold brass.

This book focuses exclusively on the manned missions of Apollo's 7 through 17. The book is divided into chapters for each of the 10 manned missions and a final chapter at the end of the book about the Hasselblad cameras used during the flights. Many of the photos are not the common ones you've seen on every book and magazine cover the last nearly 5 decades. All the photos are taken by the astronauts during the missions, thus you do not get any photos of the spacecraft hardware being built, or even photos of mission launches from the ground or splashdown.

Overall, a very welcome addition to any follower of the Apollo program's photographic legacy.

mostly oddball photos - would have been better combined with the traditional ones, I recommend "moonshots" as a better choice for those who are picky

I just received my copy about an hour ago. It is beautifully bound; the print paper is so heavy and apparently high quality that it took me a moment to realize that I did not have two pages stuck together when I turned my first page. The images are carefully curated, beautifully reproduced, and simply breathtaking in their clarity and other-worldliness. I like the captions being gathered together after each section instead of being placed adjacent to each shot - it reduces visual clutter and in my opinion was a good decision by the editors. A single-volume compilation of shots from each of the manned missions from Apollo 7 to 17, as the title indicates, with informative sections about the cameras, training, and techniques used to obtain these iconic images. If you are a serious student or enthusiast of the Apollo program, trust me, you are going to want this fine volume!

High Quality, but the book is bound upside down!

This is a very beautiful, high-quality, thick photography book of Apollo missions Vii through XVii. It is printed in Germany on white acid-free paper, I believe. I own several other books on the Apollo missions and this one beats them all .

The spine along the bottom was damaged. Corners of hard cover front & back damaged. Do not consider that condition as meeting what a new book is.

I'm too young to have seen the Apollo launches but as a lover of aerospace and tech it's jaw dropping to see what man has been able to achieve way back when a computer was the size of a room and Mid Century design reigned supreme. I love this book, it has beautiful images of the moon and the Apollo astronauts working and doing science as well as great info on their respected missions. It is a book filled with small treasures of historical significance and would be a great gift or an amazing part of any family library. I am at the age to hopefully see mankind go back to the moon and on to other worlds and I hope to one day also add those books to my family library.

A very fine book and collector's item. The jet black lunar sky and the eerie monochrome landscape are luxuriously displayed in several wide-pan shots, and there are plenty of fascinating photos of the moon and earth taken from the command module. Oddly, this book smells like paint! (maybe it's just fresh off the printers, but still, the smell was quite strong and I felt rather dizzy flipping through it). The other thing is that the edges of the book were a bit blunted because the seller didn't wrap it with a cushioning material, so it was just bumping around inside the box. But never mind; the book itself is excellent and I highly recommend it if you're an Apollo enthusiast or just enjoy space related science and technology. I can't compare it to any other Apollo photography titles out there since this is the only one I own, but I'm definitely very glad to have it.

After the Apollo astronauts came back from their moon landings, we had to wait a few days while their films went to a lab to be developed. The wait was worth it, the photos far surpassed anything we saw on the TV, and this book has some of the best of these. (Check the photos at the top of Amazon’s page for this book.) For collectors, some of these are familiar, but there are also some photos that you won’t see elsewhere.

This book is a little sparse in text, and lacking in information. It is organized into sections, with only a few paragraphs about each mission. Each photo gets only a few words. I would like some more details to tell me about what I am seeing. These photos are so historical, they deserve more than this.

The photo captions are grouped together on one page for each mission. I would rather have them together with each photo, to save from having to flip back and forth to read the caption. There is room to have these next to most of the photos.

If you’re into photography, one of the best parts of the book is in the back, where it tells about the cameras, the films, the training, and the techniques used in taking these photographs. There is also a section in the front where Walter Cunningham tells about the challenges he faced in the photography.