Books with title Matthew Looney's Voyage to the Earth

In the days before the Apollo landings, Matthew Looney lives with his parents and his sister on the Moon and wonders if there is life on Earth. He gets his chance to find out when he is chosen as a cabin boy on the great Commander Lockhard’s expedition to the South Pole. The result is a wacky, zany adventure that even brings back the secret of a mysterious substance known as water. The beloved Space Age character Matthew Looney returns for a new generation in this special Octavian edition of the acclaimed series from renowned children’s writer Jerome Beatty, Jr.

Avon Camelot 23069 Trade Paperback 6th Printing; First Camelot Printing Oct 1972; original copyright 1965. 160 pp. Size 7.5" by 5" by 0.5". Binding intact; no loose pages. Front cover shows faint folding crease; half title page (being the front free endpaper) has stamp of former owner's name and address; otherwise, covers and pages clean and unmarked. B&W illustrations by Gahan Wilson, including 32 full-page. From the back cover: "The Moon People realize there IS life on Earth because Earth has bombed the Moon!" The Moon sends an expeditionary force to invade Earth that includes Matthew, who gets inadvertently left behind. Of course, life on Earth is full of dangerous animals, including humans, poisonous oxygen, and deadly water. Read how Matthew gets home again!

Jerome Beatty Jr began this series in the early 1960s, at the dawn of the Space Age, when 20th-century children were especially fascinated by the likelihood of space missions and adventures to the Moon in their own lifetimes. The NASA Apollo Program figures into the stories as well. For example, in one episode, Matthew witnesses the Earthlings' first feeble attempts to "explore" the Moon. Beatty uses Matthew Looney's curiosity about the Earth and his desire to embark on voyages of discovery as a literary device. His readers identify with Matthew Looney because of their own yearning for adventure and fascination with space exploration. Kids in the 1960s, growing up in a time when human beings were first exploring space, would see themselves in the young Moon-boy who was growing up in his own era of early space exploration.