THE LIBRARY MOVES UPTOWN:
Amelia Earhart
Last Flight
(1937)
"The dimensions of my cubbyhole are four feet eight inches high, four feet six inches wide, and four feet six inches fore-and-aft. If you want to set up those measurements in your drawing room or library, it will help visualize the quarters in which a pilot works. Realize, too, that nearly every inch of floor, wall and ceiling is occupied with equipment. There are considerably more than a hundred gadgets in a modern cockpit that the pilot must periodically look at or twiddle.
And how does all that compare with a kitchen? "
On July 2, 1936, Amelia Earhart disappeared over the South Pacific in her Lockheed Electra. She was on the last leg of her round-the-world flight from Miami to Howland Island. Earhart's disappearance, widely covered in the press and on the radio, captured the attention of the nation. She was one of the most well-known public figures of the 1930s with an uncanny resemblance to the boyish Charles Lindbergh. In the White House Eleanor Roosevelt closely followed the rescue efforts undertaken by the U.S. Navy. It was the most extensive sea search to date in U.S. history. Earhart's remains, and those of her co-pilot, were never found.
Earhart's Lockheed Electra from Last Flight
"If you ever figure in any unusual exploit, be it a flight, a voyage in a small boat, or, say a channel swim," Earhart once remarked, "there's a publisher close behind you who is treading on your heels." In Earhart's case, George Putnam (the grandson of the publisher G.P. Putnam), was the man shadowing her every move. Putnam, who married Earhart in 1931, manipulated her public-speaking engagements, lecture tours and writing assignments and raised money for her flights. A master of promotion, he seized every opportunity to publicize his wife's career. They were an early celebrity couple.
World Flight was the original title of the manuscript Earhart had promised her publishers to celebrate her record-breaking flight. It would have been her third book. After her death, Putnam basted the work together from Earhart's dispatches, notes and log-books scribbled in the cockpit as she flew over four continents.
Earhart was realistic about the hazards of flight and expressed uncertainty about completing the journey. It was going to be a feat of extreme navigational skill to locate a two-mile long sandbar in the South Pacific. Earhart's last radio contact was received on July 2 at 3:20 p.m. She had half an hour's fuel supply left. "I have a feeling there is just one more flight in my system," she had told Putnam. "This trip is it."
Robert Josephy (1903–1993) was one of the great American book designers and typographers of the 1930s and 1940s. He is known for a design style that was clean and straightforward. His typography was equally pure, the antithesis of baroque. Josephy, who worked for Alfred A. Knopf until 1925, left his mark on books by T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.
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