Five-thousand-year-old seals carved from semiprecious stones and used to inscribe clay tablets record the earliest conception of flight. Among the collection's thousands of books are priceless volumes printed before 1501. Many, such as Robert Hooke's Philosophical Collections (1682), are serious, scientific studies of the possibility of flight. Others are about imaginary voyages into space and to other worlds, including Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1547), Cyrano de Bergerac's account of a voyage to the moon first published in 1650, and, of course, the 19th-century classics of Jules Verne. More than 2,000 prints, portraits, engravings, etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs comprise a unique and arresting pictorial history of aeronautics. Important letters written by pioneers of flight -- Montgolfier, Blanchard, Lunardi, Lilienthal, Count von Zeppelin, Santos-Dumont, Langley, and the Wright brothers -- are to be found among the collection's manuscript holdings. There are also rare commemorative medallions, sheet music, posters, dime novels, postcards and postage stamps, early flight manuals, catalogues of aircraft equipment, match boxes, and children's games and toys -- all recording, in one way or another, humanity's aspirations to fly.

The collection was assembled by Richard Gimbel (1898-1970), who began collecting whileserving with the 8th U.S. Army Air Force in England during World War II, and continued after becoming curator of aeronautical literature at Yale University. The collection was donated to the United States Air Force Academy upon his death.