Author: Dennis Crenshaw, with PG Navarro
Publisher: Anomalist Books, 2009
Price: £12.95 (paperback)
Isbn: 9781933665351

Back in 19th-century America, during the Gold Rush era, there was a club of flying enthusiasts in California named the Sonora Aviation Club. Fifty years before the Wright brothers got off the ground, men like Edward Hartung, Thomas Gray, Edward “Shovel” Koch, Adolf Goetz, and Tosh Wilson were defying gravity in their magnificent flying machines; complicated structures with names like the Aero Gander, the Aero Trump, the Gasevor, and the Aero Condor. Something of a secret society (controlled by the even more mysterious NYZMA), the Aviation Club would have been completely forgotten were it not for Charles Dellschau (1880–1923), who recorded their baffling techno­logy, their feats and their squabb­les in obsessional detail.

It sounds too good to be true, and it is. But Dellschau certainly existed, living reclusively and filling thousands of pages with drawings, collages and cryptic text about his Aero Club. Found on a dump in 1968, Dellschau’s work – now worth thousands of dollars per page – has made him one of America’s foremost outsider artists. Pete Navarro has investigated him for many years, and Dennis Crenshaw writes up Navarro’s quest with a mythomaniac absorption, trying to create maximum doubt as to whether there might, poss­ibly, be something real behind Dellschau’s creations. This bogus historical angle is entertaining up to a point, but ultimately a slightly heavy-handed bit of mystery-mongering, as if someone was arguing for a possible reality behind the work of Henry Darger (the janitor who died in 1973 leaving thousands of pages of manuscript and artwork about his ‘Vivian Girls’).

Despite this lumbering intrigue (and the amateurish narrative and low production values) this is still a book packed with interest, coming at a junction of several fascinating areas: outsider art, early flight, coded texts, alternat­ive technologies and even a touch of trippy steampunk. It includes a brief resumé of early flight in America and elsewhere (mostly ball­oon-based), the UFO-like “Great Airship Mystery” of 1896–7, and the press cuttings (or “press blooms” as he called them) that Dellschau collaged into his work. One of these involves a British secret weapon, the Dundonald Destroyer (in fact from a short story by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews) and another, on page 260, features none other than Charles Fort – named in the collage, but oddly unremarked by the authors of this book – included with the ‘Aero Myself’ on a Dellschau page with some extraterrestrial ships and the headline ‘Are Sky Spies Snooping Round This Lil’ Ol’ Earth.’ Curiouser and curiouser.