This library card comes from an old copy of Roy A. Gallant’s “Exploring the Moon” and shows the circulation history of this particular edition throughout the 1980s.

Gallant has been a professor at the University of Southern Maine since 1979 and is the director there of the Southworth Planetarium. Before that however, he began his writing career with “Boy’s Life” magazine. When his article on the origin of the moon resulted in hundreds of letters of interest, he began to consider a career as a science writer.

Gallant’s first book, “Exploring the Moon,” was published in 1955 and not only sold over 100,000 copies but led to a series of ‘Exploring’ books touching on chemistry, weather and planets.

This book was, for many, an introduction to the Moon, as it would be another fourteen years before Neil Armstrong set foot on it, and four years before the Soviet Union crashed their Luna II probe into the surface.

Gallant’s career would span 50 years and include 96 titles. His last book, “Meteorite Hunter”, was published in 2001, and chronicled his journey across Siberia in search of anything related to the Tunguska Event of 1908, an unexplained explosion said to be 1000 times more powerful than Hiroshima.

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