The Lafayette Flying Corps by HALL, James Norman and Charles Bernard Nordhoff - 1920

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920. Hardcover. Very Good. First edition. Two volumes. Quartos. 513, [1]; 360, [2]pp. Extensively illustrated. Blue cloth stamped in gilt. A couple of pages a little roughly opened in Volume Two, corners a little bumped, a nice and sound very good or better set lacking the dustwrappers. Small publisher's flyer laid in advertising other WWI aviation books. Exhaustive contemporary history of the Corps of American pilots serving with the French Air Force in WWI, including the pilots of the American volunteer Lafayette Escadrille squadron, although there was some crossover. Much of the set is devoted to biographies of the participants, including that of Georgia-born Eugene Bullard, the first African-American combat pilot known as "The Black Sparrow of Death" (or "l'Hirondelle noire de la mort", if you prefer). Both Hall and Nordhoff served in the Corps and later wrote many novels together including *Mutiny on the Bounty*. A handsome set and probably the single best published source on the Corps.