The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum--continuing its yearlong 25th anniversary celebration--will host a holiday book festival on Dec. 13, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Visitors will be able to choose from a wide variety of child and adult aviation- and space-related titles for sale and meet the authors from the museum staff, who will be on-hand to sign and discuss their works. Free gift-wrapping will be available. There will also be hourly drawings for book prizes and collectible giveaways.

The holiday book festival will be held in the museum's "Milestones of Flight" gallery, which is home to the original 1903 Wright Flyer, Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, Chuck Yeager's Bell X-1 and the Apollo 11 command module Columbia.

Among the two dozen titles available at the festival will be At the Controls, the museum's new 144-page guided tour through the cockpits of some of the most famous flying machines ever built. The festival will also preview some of the large-scale photographs from the book that will travel nationally as a Smithsonian exhibition beginning in December.

Museum director Gen. J.R. "Jack" Dailey, who wrote the introduction to the museum's new Book of Flight, which he will sign on Dec. 13, calls the event "a great chance for holiday shoppers to take home a personalized treasure for themselves or every armchair astronaut and veteran pilot on their list."