Lockheed Flyby

Plain brown cover of the "Flyby" book

We've already shared quite a few of engineering's classic jokes, and we are still impressed with the beautiful tongue-in-cheek posters put out as ads by Varian.  Back in the late 1940s, cartoonist Dick Shaw contributed a series of cartoons to the in-house publication "Lockheed Reports".  His efforts proved incredibly popular, and five years worth of them were collected into a hard-cover book called "Flyby: A Parade of Chuckles from Lockheed".  Though there isn't a date on our copy, we see other people putting the publication date as 1952.   You can still sometimes find copies of it on Amazon or ABEbooks. 

There is not a lot of information on Dick Shaw. It seems earlier in his career he was at Disney, and he also worked on Mr. Magoo. His son Richard (born 1941) is a well-known ceramicist/sculpter.

Below are just a few of the many gems in Flyby. Note that in 1976 Shaw produced a similar cartoon book called Way Outer Space, that seems to be even rarer. Don't try to outbid us on ebay!

 

Author : Brenda