Prices on Mailer’s moon book are out of this world
By Matthew Battles | 07.02.09
I can’t decide whether this is evidence of the book’s staying power, or a sign that its end is near: to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing, the art publisher Taschen will release “Moonfire: the Epic Journey of Apollo 11,” a book of photographs from the mission with excerpts from Norman Mailer’s 1970 book “Of a Fire on the Moon.”
Taschen plans to release an edition of 1969 copies, most of which will have a retail price of one thousand dollars. Twelve copies, however, will be bound with a fragment of a lunar meteorite. Priced individually according to the size of the sample, the rock-bound editions will likely trump Taschen’s previous most-expensive book, the Muhammad Ali tribute volume GOAT, which went for five grand apiece.
Someone I know suggested that “Goodnight Moon” might make a more charming setting for a lunar-rock binding.
But Mailer’s work has a suitably luxe pedigree: when he sold Little, Brown the rights to the Life magazine article on Apollo which was the basis of the book, the pugilistic novelist fetched a million-dollar advance. And Mailer ends his book with a lyrical passage about a sample of lunar rock brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts:
“Was she very old, three billion years or more? Yet she was young, she had just been transported here, and there was something young about her… (I) wondered if her craters were the scars of a war which had once allowed the earth to come together in the gathered shatterings of a mighty moon….”
It’s important to note that “Moonfire” won’t be bound with rocks brought back by astronauts – which are essentially priceless. (Photographs taken during the Apollo missions, by contrast, are NASA images, and as such are in the public domain). The Taschen rocks are lunar meteorites, tiny chunks of rock that were broken away from the moon by meteor impacts and showered upon the Earth as falling stars over millions of years.
The supreme irony, of course, is that the moon was born of the Earth. A cataclysmic meteor strike more than three billion years ago cleaved away a great portion of the young planet’s crust, which formed into the moon through the long ages of its orbit. The lunar rocks are only Earth rocks by another name; however astronomical their price on the market, they have only come home.
Matthew Battles is a freelance writer in Jamaica Plain, Mass.
Comments
2. Matthew Battles | 07.02.09
Well said, T. Smith! Of course it’s true that the lunar geology is much different from the terrestrial, and that both lunar meteorites and the samples collected by Apollo astronauts (not to mention those brought back by the Soviet Luna missions). Your comment hints at the extraordinary science that’s been done with rocks from the moon. As you say, my point was merely a poetic one about the origin of the moon–a story that the lunar rocks themselves helped to tell.
3. Phil Whitmer | 07.03.09
Actually, there is water on the moon. It’s contained in volcanic glass spherules brought back by the Apollo missions. There could be a substantial amount of water at the poles where the glassy ejecta from fire fountains possibly settled.
4. Matthew Battles | 07.05.09
Right–the LCROSS probe in orbit right now is set to record data as its Centaur motor crashes into the permanent shadows of the lunar south pole. It will be watching for evidence of water in the collision plume. There’s clearly a lot of science to be done on the moon. Will the meaning of the moon in our sky change as we get to know it better? During Apollo, lots of thinkers thought reaching the moon would rob it of its magic. But it seems likely that lunar science will only enrich our relationship with our unique satellite.
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1. T. Smith | 07.02.09
“Lunar rocks are only Earth rocks.” While poetic, this is hardly accurate. Lunar rocks have undergone a radically different evolution.
For example:
*They formed under much lower gravity
*Surface rocks on the moon are exposed to solar wind directly (no atmosphere or magnetic field)
*The moon is also subject to constant meteorite and micrometeorite bombardment –creating breccias, impact melts, etc.
*The moon has (proportionally) much less iron, nickle and other heavy elements and little or no water at all
*The lack of plate tectonics means the many rocks are never recycled and are therefore much older than most rocks on earth.
The Earth is not the ‘home’ of moon rocks. Moon rocks are distinct because they have formed under such different conditions. And just as diamonds are rare on the surface of the earth, moon rocks (lunar meteorites) are valuable because they are extremely uncommon on earth–and it is extraordinarily difficult and expensive to go to the source to get more.