US-36 is kind of special to me. It is one of just a handful of US highways with an endpoint in my home state and one of just two that pass through my birth county. It’s even more special to Allan Ferguson. He grew up near the route in Illinois, has ancestral connections to the eastern end in Ohio, and currently lives near its western end in Colorado. It has had a role in much of his life from childhood vacations and visits to relatives to business trips and drives between old and new homes as an adult. Not all of his travels between Colorado and Illinois have been on Route 36. Not surprisingly, his early trips back home were on expressways. At some point, he tried US-36 and came to realize three things. The first was that it took no more time than driving the interstates. Between Denver and central Illinois, the US-36 is quite straight and about 100 miles shorter than either I-70 or I-80. Secondly, it was relaxing rather than stressful. The third thing he realized was that the drive was actually interesting and that realization eventually led to this book.
Ferguson stresses that this is “a book about today’s Route 36″ (italics his). He delivers plenty of history and even describes a few older alignments, but the subject of this book is the Route 36 shown on current maps and marked by modern signs. That means there are no turn-by-turn directions that fans of historic routes such as the Lincoln Highway or Route 66 might expect in a guide to a road. And there is another possible expectation that Ferguson intentionally does not meet. There are no lists of restaurants or places to stay. This sort of information is, he points out, ever-changing and available elsewhere.
Today’s US-36 runs through six states in connecting Uhrlichville, Ohio, with Estes Park, Colorado. There is a chapter for each of those states. Following an overview, which provides some history, geography, and geology, a drive through the state is described. Both the chapters and the drives are sequenced east-to-west. The basic organization is by town. Each town entry begins with some common items such as population and a website address. Museums, parks, and libraries are also listed where they exist. Descriptions of various well-researched points of interest, often with photographs, follow.
I know that all sounds rather formulaic, which it probably is, and maybe dry and boring, which it decidedly is not. Good writing makes for easy reading and the quality of Ferguson’s writing makes even this fact-heavy subject matter go down smoothly. In particular, I found the state overviews a very pleasant way to be informed.
A Section II, titled “Background,” follows the guide. A very well-done history of land transportation across the United States, its two chapters divide the story more or less at the appearance of the automobile. This history is not specific to US-36 and reading it is not at all necessary for enjoying a drive along the route. Depending on your own background, it can be a very nice introduction or a very nice review.
Naturally, many of the place names in the guide were familiar to me and I was pleasantly surprised to see a familiar “people name” in there, too. Road fan Jim Grey has documented a number of roads at JimGrey.net. Of course, Ferguson’s interest and recommendation was aimed at Jim’s photo-rich report on US-36 between Indianapolis and the Illinois border. I’ll second Ferguson’s recommendation and add that Jim’s reports on several other old roads — and lots of old cameras — are also worthwhile.
Some of those familiar place names come from the fact that I’ve driven certain bits of Thirty-Six hundreds of times. I have, however, driven the whole thing only once. This book’s east to west order matched the direction of my single full-length pass which made it easy to compare the book with my own memories and journal. I’m glad it wasn’t a competition. I documented very little that Ferguson didn’t, while he identified many points of interest that I missed entirely. I’ll do better next time.
The book has its own website at US36GuideBook.
Route 36: Ohio to Colorado – America’s Heartland Highway, Allan McAllister Ferguson, WFPublishing, August 1, 2019, 10 x 8 inches, 264 pages, ISBN 978-0971032668
Available through Amazon.
This book is unusual and unusually good. The Dickens Scenes of the title are those in Cambridge, Ohio, that starred in this blog’s most recent regular weekly post. There are currently 94 of those scenes and each began life as a sketch by a fellow named Bob Ley. Bob is one of a group of writers, known as 
The individual photos are not credited but acknowledgments at the front of the book identify Tom Davey and Lindy Thaxton as the photographers. The photos are all quite good and do a nice job of capturing each scene from its best vantage point. Together, the book’s even-numbered (i.e., lefthand) pages make up the sort of catalog often prepared for a museum display. The village really is such a display with the sidewalks of Cambridge forming the museum.
Sometimes I astound my friends with my knowledge, admittedly quite useless, of unusual and obscure roadside attractions. Othertimes I astound myself with my complete ignorance of a major and fairly well-known piece of public art. 
This book didn’t put US-20 on my to‑drive list, that happened long ago, but it did move it up quite a bit. At 3365 miles, Route 20 is currently the longest of the U.S. Numbered Highways so it’s quite naturally a road I’ve thought about driving. I have driven bits of it, of course, and crossed over it many times. It would be pretty hard to completely avoid a road that crosses the entire country as this one does. In Historic US Route 20: A Journey Across America’s Longest Highway, Bryan Farr documents an east to west drive over the entire length of the highway and the entire breadth of the nation with a couple hundred great color photos. There is something I’d like to see in just about every one of those photos.
A lot of things about the site have changed over the years but some things begun with that first trip have stuck. The concept of a page for each day with access to the next and previous day has been in place since the beginning as has a cover page with direct access to individual days. The idea of using the daily “Next’ and “Prev” button to (usually) represent the vehicle being used also goes back to that first trip. An animated GIF showing progress has been used on a few subsequent trips but it requires knowing the full route in advance and that’s often not the case. Besides, it’s a fair amount of work.
The final cover page for that trip talks about it being temporary. As I said at the time, I expected it to go away because “I’ll need the space or retiring it will just seem right.” Web space became increasingly cheap and apparently retiring it never seemed right. Two decades later that first trip journal is still online and I’ve added 155 more. There is a 
My original notion of what’s inside Diners of the Great Lakes was not very accurate, but I’m not the least bit disappointed. For no particular reason, I more or less expected this book to be something akin to a directory of diners currently existing in the Great Lakes region along with a telling of their individual histories. There is a certain amount of that, but it comes late in the book after Engle has delivered not just the history of diner operation in the region but of the manufacture of diners there along with their development as something distinct from what occurred nearer the Atlantic.
And now for something completely different. Anyone who thought releasing two books within three months might be overdoing it will have no doubts about that being the case when they see another appear a week later. But this is a different kettle of fish. Really. Six of Each is a collection of photographs drawn from the previously published travelogues. Each of those travelogues is available in two forms. There is a black-and-white printed version and a color digital version. Photo-quality color printing is still relatively expensive in the low-volume print-on-demand world. Printing the books in black and white keeps them reasonably priced. On the other hand, color in digital files is free. Offering B&W paperbacks and color ebooks isn’t ideal but it keeps the books affordable and color at least available.
So what I’ve done is pick a half dozen pictures from each of the existing travelogues and combine them in a Blurb magazine. The magazine is only available through Blurb (that’s one of those magazine restrictions) and there is no digital version available (that’s my restriction). It’s also more expensive than it seems a 32-page “magazine” ought to be. But it does let me see what some of my photographs would look like using something besides black ink on stationary paper. And it’s there for anyone else who would like to look.
Too soon? What had been my most recent travelogue, 
This is my fourth self published book; All are travelogues. This one is a midquel that covers the omitted middle section of a trip that formed part of the previous book,