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.
The industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a revolution in food sales. Factories might now operate around the clock and their employees needed to be fed quickly and at non-traditional times. At first, food prepared at home would be sold from a pushcart, but it wasn’t too long before larger wagons containing elementary kitchens appeared. Simple freshly prepared items were sold to hungry workers and others through windows. As the twentieth century rolled in, larger horse-drawn wagons, with inside seating for a few patrons became common. The earliest lunch carts were naturally built by their operators. Eventually, however, manufacturers, such as Closson Lunch Wagon Company of Westfield, NY, began constructing wagons to sell. Engle illustrates the development of lunch wagons and the stationary diners that followed them, with wonderful period photographs, advertisements, and newspaper clippings.
As the story progresses from Closson’s horse-drawn wooden wagons through large built-on-site chrome Starlites, I found it interesting how the nomenclature changed slowly from lunch wagon to dining car to diner. I also found it personally interesting to learn that diners had once been manufactured in my home state of Ohio including some in nearby Dayton.
The book ends with what I once thought might fill the whole thing. The “Great Lakes Diner Directory” contains an extensive listing of diners with photos, descriptions, and locations. As Engle points out, assuring that the list is absolutely complete and current is impossible. The region’s diner population, like that everywhere else, is dynamic. “Call before you go,” is certainly good advice but the list in this book is as good as it gets.
Diners of the Great Lakes, Michael Engle, Michael Engle Publishing, November 1, 2018, 8.5 x 11 inches, 322 pages, ISBN 978-0976938927
Available through Amazon.
Today is Easter. I know that because I looked it up on the internet. It was easy. It was easy in the early days, too. Easter was originally simply the Sunday of Passover week. Since most early Christians had once been Jews, they just naturally knew when Passover was. Even those that had converted to Christianity directly from Druidism probably had some Jewish friends they could ask. Easy, peasy. Too easy, it seems, for some.
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.
