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Book Review
After Ike
Michael S. Owen

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There are things that fans of old roads or of transportation history in general falsely assume that everyone knows about. One such item is the continent crossing Motor Transport Corps convoy of 1919. In the summer following the end of the first World War, a group of military personnel and vehicles set off from Washington, DC, to test the nation’s roads all the way to San Francisco. Although he was primarily an observer on the trip, his future accomplishments make Dwight Eisenhower the member of the convoy best-known today. Michael Owen uses the future president’s nickname in naming this telling of his own retracing of the 3,250-mile-long path that some 300 men and 81 vehicles of all shapes and sizes followed a century ago.

As one might expect, Owen mixes lots of information about the military convoy’s trip with the description of his own journey. Much less expected is the fact that he is not one of those long-time fans of old roads or transportation history that I mentioned earlier. As a US Ambassador, he spent considerable time in Africa and Asia. Now retired, he is happily becoming better acquainted with the roads and attractions of his homeland.

On his coast to coast drive, Owen is part researching author and part curious tourist. He often spends multiple days in one place and digs into local history and points of interest. Some of what he finds relates to the convoy and some is simply interesting on its own. A sampling includes a stop at Carnegie-Mellon to talk with a professor about autonomous vehicles and a visit to the Pro Football Hall of Fame which provides an opportunity to talk about Ike’s time as running back at West Point. He visits several museums including the Studebaker museum in South Bend, IN, and the El Dorado County Historical Museum in Placerville, CA. He spends time in small libraries and chatting with locals.

Much of the convoy related information Owen shares comes from journals and official reports written by the participants but local newspaper archives are also used extensively. The motorized convoy was a major event in those early days of the automobile and much attention was focused on its progress. Communities along the route often vied with each other to host the convoy and the dinners, dances, and demonstrations were documented by the local press. More or less typical is the South Bend [Indiana] News-Times report of the convoy’s arrival and departure that included the observation that “…lemonade was given to them in abundance by the Chamber of Commerce.” In Austin, NV, the Reese River Reveille reported that officials “…placed shower baths in the four cells of the jail…” for use by the soldiers.

Some non-convoy related items Owen finds in those old newspapers are used to provide a peek at the world of 1919. A headline from that South Bend News-Times issue reads “Seven Women Take Aeroplane Rides!” From the DeKalb [Illinois] Daily Chronicle, he quotes an article about the convoy’s “3,000,000 candle power searchlight” followed by quotes from an advertisement for the latest Thor Electric Washing Machine. In writing about his modern-day travels, Owen uses signs he sees in a manner similar to the way he uses those period newspaper items. It’s kind of like having a passenger who reads signs aloud; Signs like “Farm fresh eggs! Laid by Happy Chickens”, “Food! Liquor! Wine! Beauty Products!”, and “Gardening for God Brings Peas of Mind”.

Eighteen pages of black and white photos are placed just past the book midpoint. All were taken by the author. Readers familiar with the Lincoln Highway and the modern Lincoln Highway Association will find some familiar places and faces.

The book cover bio says Owen has “driven over the Lincoln Highway several times” but he doesn’t come across as a seasoned road tripper. On one hand, that brings some freshness to the writing. Things like reading aloud signs about eggs bring a sense of sharing the surprises to the reporting. On the other, it may be responsible for allowing a few minor errors to slip in. Early in the book, Owen notes his awareness of “America’s penchant for superlatives: biggest, oldest, first, fastest, best.” He does not list “only” and does pass along a couple of not quite true “only” claims. Qualifying it with the word “purportedly”, he writes that the bust of Lincoln at Wyoming’s Sherman Hill is “…the only statue of Lincoln on the entire Lincoln Highway” and says that the rotary jail in Council Bluffs, IA, “…is the only one of its kind in the US”. Regarding Lincoln statues on the LH, those in Jefferson, IA, and Fremont, NE, come immediately to mind. As for rotating “squirrel cage” jails, the one in Crawfordsville, IN, is not only standing but operational. These errors, and a few others, are not terribly significant but I couldn’t just ignore them.

After Ike is an enjoyable read that delivers an overview of an important event in US transportation history along with a sense of what a modern-day long and leisurely road trip is like. Owen’s fresh eyes and all those signs make it a bit unlike many travelogues.

After Ike: On the Trail of the Century-Old Journey that Changed America, Michael S. Owen, Dog Ear Publishing, LLC, July 22, 2019, 9 x 6 inches, 224 pages, ISBN 978-1457570421
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
Route 36 Ohio to Colorado
Allan McAllister Ferguson

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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.

Book Review
Tales… from the Dickens Scenes!
The Rainy Day Writers

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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 Rainy Day Writers, who help each other practice and improve their craft and occasionally collaborate on projects. Ten of them contributed to Tales… from the Dickens Scenes.

The book’s organization is simple. Each of the scenes is the subject of a two page spread. On the left-hand page is a black and white photo of the scene along with the Bob Ley sketch on which it is based. Text that appears on a sign placed by the scene completes the page. Each sign contains an identifying number and the scenes appear in the book sequenced by those numbers.

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.

Filling the righthand pages is handled with skill and creativity by The Rainy Day Writers. The text on each page was created for the scene it is associated with. There are works of fiction that imagine a day or a minute in the lives of the figures in the scene, and there are factual essays with subjects such as Victorian England, modern Cambridge, or Charles Dickens himself. Some are thought-provoking, some are educational, many are both. Simply noting the great difference between life in the late nineteenth century and today is thought-provoking and educational.

I’m sure that tailoring a story or an essay to a single page was often a challenge for the writer, but their small size helps make reading them about as non-challenging as it gets. Reading the odd-numbered pages in an easy chair makes sense and so does having the even-numbered pages at hand while walking around downtown Cambridge during the Christmas season. The book is available online but I suggest getting it at the source if possible. At least “while supplies last”, copies sold at the Dickens Victorian Village Welcome Center (647 Wheeling Avenue) have been signed by all ten of the contributing writers plus you can put the book to work as soon as you step through the door.

The first paragraph of this article contains a link to The Rainy Day Writers website. The site contains quite a bit of good information but appears to be less current than the group’s Facebook page.

Tales… from the Dickens Scenes!, The Rainy Day Writers, Independently published, September 21, 2019, 6 x 9 inches, 198 pages, ISBN 978-1691098804
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
A Mythic Obsession
Tom Kupsh

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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. A stop on a recent Society for Commercial Archeology bus tour was an occasion of the latter sort. I imagine readers of this review will have thoughts that are similarly divided. Some will wonder just what is that pile of junk and why would anyone put it on the cover of a book. Others will smile with instant and delighted recognition. Ah yes, the Forevertron.

From one perspective, the Forevertron is a 65-foot tall sculpture made of various bits of scrap metal. From another, it is a fantastic device waiting to propel Dr. Evermor “up to the celestial spheres.”  From a third, it is a marvelous project that helped Tom Every deal with the real world. Tom Kupsh covers all three of these perspectives in A Mythic Obsession.

The book contains something of a Tom Every biography. It describes his early attraction to unwanted stuff and what seems to be a natural talent for getting some good out of what other people throw away. It tells about his ups and downs in salvage and professional scavenging and his long-time involvement with Alex Jordan and his House on the Rock. His relationship with Eleanor Gryttenholm, a.k.a., Lady Eleanor, that continues today, having survived both marriage and divorce, is in there too. It’s a life that Kupsh describes as rocky but never dull.

It is Every’s artwork, however, that attracts all the attention and warrants a book. Much of it is big, like the Forevertron, but he has also produced some rather small pieces. The common attributes are whimsey, creativity, and scrap metal. Kupsh describes most if not all of Every’s major works. His descriptions usually include information about when and how the piece was made and sometimes even why. He often tells what the components actually are and where they came from. This is very much the case with the Forevertron and that is something I very much appreciated. The book and the sculptures are a natural pair. At times, while reading the book, I found myself wishing I had read it before visiting the collection so I would have been aware of various details about what I was seeing. On the other hand, I’m kind of glad I had my first look with few preconceptions. I’m thinking that neither sequence is wrong and that whether you start with reading or visiting, you’re going to have to repeat. Seeing the sculptures will raise questions that only the book will answer and the book will fuel curiosity that only a visit will satisfy. I intend to return with book in hand.

The biographical bits are aided by several pictures and there are pictures included of the various pieces of art described. Most are black and white but there is a section of really nice color photos that includes an annotated view of the Forevertron. You can bet on me having that page bookmarked when I next head to Wisconsin.

A Mythic Obsession, Tom Kupsh, Chicago Review Press, June 1, 2008, 6 x 9 inches, 196 pages, ISBN 978-1556527609
Available through Amazon.

I purchased my book onsite from Lady Eleanor. Tom is in a nursing home and rarely gets to the Forevertron these days. Both had inscribed the copies available about nine months previous. I selected one with a fairly lengthy message from Tom even though that message wasn’t quite clear to me at the time. I figured it would become readable when I was sitting still in good lighting. It hasn’t. Among the few phrases I can make out are “80 years” (His 80th birthday was five days earlier.), “I can’t see”, “don’t stop your art”, and “The House on the Rock”. All help from those with better eyesight or insight is appreciated.

Book Review
Historic US Route 20
Bryan Farr

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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 chapter on each of the twelve states crossed by US-20 follows an introduction and a brief history of the highway. Each chapter’s opening page contains a small map and some statistics such as length and highest and lowest elevation. A few pictures also appear on those opening pages but the best pictures form the chapter’s body. Many get a page all to themselves and few pages contain more than two. That means they are generally big enough to appreciate and the good print quality also helps.

Some images are of noted man made landmarks, such as the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and the Veterans Memorial Bridge in Cleveland, Ohio. Others capture the natural beauty of places like the Driftless Area near Elizabeth, Illinois, and Yellowstone Lake. Together they show off the wide range of experiences available along the highway as well as Farr’s photographic skills.

Although it’s certainly not overdone, the book is not without text. There is that one-page introduction and two-page history that open the book and virtually every picture gets some sort of description. Some get a one-line caption while others get a paragraph or two. Most descriptions that go beyond a sentence provide some history about the subject and all are interesting. There are essentially no travel directions. This is not a travel guide. It is a photographic trip journal and a very attractive one. Even without directions, it will certainly be an aid in planning my own trip. As I said, just about every one of those photos contains something I’d like to see and something likely included in any itinerary. Plus, just flipping through it randomly keeps my desire to drive “America’s Longest Highway” at least on simmer.

A Kindle version of the book is available through the Amazon link at the end of this article. New paperback copies are available directly from the publisher at Historic US Route 20.

Historic US Route 20, Bryan Farr, The Historic US Route 20 Association, Inc., February 16, 2015, 8.5 x 11 inches, 166 pages, ISBN 978-1628476880
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
Six of Each
Denny Gibson

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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.

I had pretty much given up on being able to offer any of the travelogue photographs in printed form at anything close to a reasonable price when I saw the chance to steal another idea from Jim Grey. Jim is an excellent photographer and successful blogger whom I’ve stolen from in the past. He is responsible for what became “Trip Peeks” to fill posting commitments with minimal work. Jim has published two photo “magazines” on the Blurb platform. One is in color and the other black and white. Both look quite good and they are not outrageously priced. Magazines are available in a single 8.5×11 inch page size and have a few other restrictions. The quality is not quite up to offset printing standards and the cost is not a match for black and white but both are much more acceptable than other print-on-demand products I’ve seen.

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.

Six of Each, Denny Gibson, Trip Mouse Publishing, April 2019, paperback, 8.5 x 11 inches, 32 pages, ISBN: 978-0368444654

Preview or purchase at Blurb.

Take a look at Jim’s books here. My reviews are here and here.

I made a comment about seeing my photos “using something besides black ink on stationary paper”. The truth is I’ve seen some of my photos reproduced via some pretty high-grade offset printing in two books by Brian Butko: The Lincoln Highway: Photos Through Time and Greetings from the Lincoln Highway (Centennial Edition and newer).

Book Review
Jefferson Highway All the Way
Denny Gibson

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Too soon? What had been my most recent travelogue, A Canadian Connection, was published less than three months ago and I tend to agree with anyone thinking these paperbacks are appearing just a little too close together. But the facts are that neither the timing nor the sequence of these books was exactly arbitrary. Before I had finished writing 50 @ 70, I knew I had to produce a book covering the Canadian portion of that drive to and from Alaska, and before I had finished driving from Winnipeg to New Orleans last spring, I knew I had to produce a book covering that full-length drive of the Jefferson Highway. Then, in a manner similar to the scheduling of many road trips, I started working backward. It seemed reasonable to target release of the Jefferson Highway book ahead of the 2019 JHA conference. If there was any appetite for the book at all, it would likely peak about the time of the conference. That meant publication by early April (i.e., now). It also seemed desirable to have the tale of the Canadian portion of the Alaska trip follow the U.S. portion of the trip in 50 @ 70 without another book in between. So the sequence and overall timing was set and has come to pass. For the present, the travelogue job jar is empty.

All five existing Trip Mouse books tell stories of road trips. They are not guidebooks even though photographs and descriptions of points of interest are plentiful. All five share a common format, but the latest resembles the first a bit more closely than the others. A Decade Driving the Dixie Highway describes the many trips required to cover all of the network of roads that comprised the Dixie Highway system. Similarly, 50 @ 70 tells of multiple trips that passed through the last sixteen of fifty states. Even A Canadian Connection, which deals with a single journey, consists of northbound and southbound segments with a gap (Alaska) in between. Only By Mopar to the Golden Gate (which could have been called Lincoln Highway All the Way) and Jefferson Highway All the Way tell of a single end-to-end drive of a single historic named auto trail.

Jefferson Highway All the Way tells a little of the history of the original Jefferson Highway Association and the route it defined. It also touches on the formation of the modern JHA in 2011. But the bulk of the book concerns the events and sights (There are about 140 photos.) of that 2018 drive.

Jefferson Highway All the Way, Denny Gibson, Trip Mouse Publishing, 2019, paperback, 9 x 6 inches, 154 pages, ISBN 978-1796535280.

Signed copies available through eBay. Unsigned copies available through Amazon.

Reader reviews at Amazon are appreciated and helpful and can be submitted even if you didn’t purchase the book there.

Book Review
A Canadian Connection
Denny Gibson

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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, 50 @ 70. When I did my faux review of 50 @ 70, I joked that it would not be my third strike because the first two, while not at all hits, were not quite whiffs either. 50 @ 70 pretty much was. In looking for things to blame that on other than poor writing and an uninteresting subject, I’ve grasped at two.

One is the lack of a predefined target group. The first two books were about named auto trails, the Lincoln Highway and the Dixie Highway, which had their own fan base who could at least be informed that something new existed related to the subject of their affection. Not a lot of people are fans of being 70 years old, and any that are will most likely move on to some other number or will simply cease being fans — or anything else — completely. As for the 50 states part, I did know of a couple of ” all 50″ clubs but they are basically registries and stores with only one way communication. I recently became aware of a couple of Facebook groups focusing on visiting all fifty states so I’ll probably try dropping notes about 50 @ 70 but I don’t expect much.

The second problem is the name. I’ve long accepted that no one is going to find it by accident, but I recently found out that it can barely be found on purpose. The number one hit today for an Amazon all departments search for “50 @ 70” was an Evinrude carburetor rebuild kit. Lower ranked items included elite dumbbells and Honda foot pegs. Restricting the search to books put a John Deere manual at the top of the list. The list also contained books on mid-century music and a hot dog cookbook with 50 recipes. My book was at the bottom of the second page.

So when I picked a title for this book with gorgeous scenery, semi-exotic wild animals, native settlements, and frontier history I was careful not to chose something that looked like a broken email address or a rejected password. I also made an effort to identify with a predefined group. Canadians have been around for a long time and there’s a bunch of them. I’m not so certain that they’re actually interested in a connection to Alaska but I know there’s a good chance that, if they’re not interested, they might apologize for it.

A Canadian Connection, Denny Gibson, Trip Mouse Publishing, 2019, paperback, 9 x 6 inches, 104 pages, ISBN 978-1719274449.

Signed copies available through eBay. Unsigned copies available through Amazon.

Reader reviews at Amazon are appreciated and helpful and can be submitted even if you didn’t purchase the book there.

Book Review
Textures of Ireland
Jim Grey

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A funny thing happened on the way to this review. Not funny ha ha; Funny peculiar. This is Jim Grey’s second book. I reviewed the first, Exceptional Ordinary, in April, 2017. I figured that this review would reference that one, make some comparisons, make some jokes. It would be fun; Maybe even funny ha ha. But that review has gone missing. I don’t know how or even when. I’ve plugged the hole left by the disappearance, but my memory’s way too far gone to try recreating the original review. The best I can do is try to compensate by being twice as impressed with Textures of Ireland as I would be otherwise.

That’s a joke, of course. It’s also impossible. I’m not saying that the book has pegged my impression meter, and that I couldn’t possibly be a little more impressed with it. I’m just saying that it has put the meter close enough to the max that there’s no room for doubling. I’m even impressed with the title. I think I would have picked up on the role that the various surfaces, from rough rock walls and bluffs to smooth water and glass, play in these photos, and I may have even happened upon the word “texture” at some point, but I can’t be certain. It’s the perfect word and I think having it in the title got me focused properly from the beginning. I don’t doubt that some would prefer not to be steered in anyway at all but for me I feel it was a good thing.

Grey’s considerable writing skills see very little action in Textures of Ireland. The first page is filled with text describing the trip he and his wife made to Ireland in 2016. Neither had been there before, and for her the trip included visiting homelands she had never seen and talking with relatives she had never met. The page also provides some common background for the book’s photos. All were taken with a Nikon N2000 and 35mm lens using Kodak T-Max 400 film. There is some discussion of the reasons for choosing that combination which include the camera’s ability to take quality photographs while being rugged enough to survive the casual handling and mishandling that seem to just naturally be part of vacations. The camera’s ready availability at reasonable prices was very much a factor since it meant that a camera disaster wouldn’t automatically be a financial disaster.

Without counting, I’m sure that first page contains more words than the rest of the book combined. The camera, lens, and film are the same for all thirty-five photos and the only additional information Grey shares on each one is their location. Clearly he expects the pictures to stand on their own. They do.

Although I’m sure I’d feel cheated if they weren’t there, even the few words that identify a photo’s location aren’t really necessary. Knowing where any of these pictures were taken does not make me appreciate them any more or any less. I’ll admit that a couple of the pictures made me curious enough to check out the location before I studied the image, but more often than not I’d spend some time soaking in an image then move on without knowing or caring where it was taken. The two exceptions were a picture of people walking over an unusual jumble of rocks and the picture of a hairpin turn on a steep road. The jumbled rocks were part of The Giant’s Causeway, and I think I liked knowing that because it was a name I’d heard before. The hairpin turn was in Glengesh Pass which meant nothing to me but became a place I might seek out if given the chance.

I’m not enough of a student of photography to understand why black and  white images convey texture better than colored ones. Maybe it’s because the absence of color forces the viewer to notice the shadows which are visual indicators of texture, or maybe it’s something else that I understand even less. About three months ago I was able to look over some original prints of some of the most well known photographs in the world. It was at an exhibit called “Ansel Adams: A Photographer’s Evolution” at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. No, I’m not about to compare Jim Grey to Ansel Adams, and I won’t even try comparing any of their photographs, but I will say that some of the same things that make Adams’ images worth looking at can also be found in some of Grey’s images.

I have other favorites besides the previously mentioned Giant’s Causeway and Glengesh Pass pictures. Two of them face each other. On the left a path bordered by tall (marram?) grass curves out of sight with water and a distant shore in the background. The photo on the right hand page starts with a layer of sand at the bottom, moves to a bit of shallow smooth water, then some deeper water covered in small waves. Above that is a dark shoreline and the whole thing is topped by a sky filled with fairly angry looking clouds. A few man-made objects dot the shoreline with the straight lines of what looks like a building pretty much dead center. Both pictures were taken at Rosses Point Beach, and both pack a variety of textures into the frame. I also quite like a photo of Kylemore Abbey reflecting on itself and one of small boats tied up at Portrush.

I said there were thirty-five photos but that’s not quite true. There are thirty-five interior pages with one photo each. One of these also appears on the front cover. It looks out through the doors of Kylemore Abbey. There is also a photo on the back cover. It does not appear inside and it has no identification at all. In it are columns that go from a coal black silhouette in the center to some reasonably well lighted ones on each side. The columns are at least similar to some inside the book in photos taken at Sligo Abbey. Maybe they’re the same; Maybe not. It’s a cool picture in any case and a little mystery is not a bad thing.

In that missing review of Jim’s first book, I commented on the quality of the printing and binding. It was the first time I had seen a Blurb product and I happily reported that it was not crappy. It was quite good, in fact, and so is this one. The pages are fairly heavy semi-gloss and the printing is quite sharp which helps bring out the, you know, texture of the decidedly non-crappy photos.

Textures of Ireland and Exceptional Ordinary are available digitally or in paperback here.

Book Review
Vintage Signs of America
Debra Jane Seltzer

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I photograph a fair number of signs as I travel, and I know quite a few people who photograph many more than I. Not one, however, is in the same league as Debra Jane Seltzer. If sign hunting was an Olympic sport, the petite Seltzer would be buried under gold medals. Her photo expeditions are legendary. Until recently, when she and her dogs (currently four) headed out in the white Chevy van named Sparkle, they would take along a big stack of notes and marked up map printouts. Today there might still be a printed list of targets but Google maps and a smartphone have reduced the need for paper considerably. The target list is never limited to signs. It’s almost certain to include interesting buildings and other roadside attractions of all sorts.

Seltzer’s website, Roadside Architecture, is the primary beneficiary of these expeditions. It currently contains more than 60,000 searchable photos organized by subject and location. It’s described as “Buildings, signs, statues, and more”. Photos are added and other maintenance is performed between trips. While traveling, Seltzer maintains a blog with stories and pictures from the road and a Flickr account with pictures that didn’t appear in the blog and probably won’t make it to the website. Links to these and more can be found at the Roadside Architecture website.

So why a book? Even though the subject matter of the structured website, the blog, and the Flickr account is essentially the same, they have different uses and different audiences. A book’s audience is different yet. In reading the book, I spotted a couple of signs that could be within range of upcoming travels. As I put them on my own list, I realized that the book could be used as a “shopping list” for travelers. The website, of course, is a super shopping list and both the blog and Flickr can can be sources of things to see, but the printed page is consumed differently and if the book gave me some ideas I’m sure it can do that for others.

However, before I thought of Vintage Signs of America as a shopping list, I thought of it as a primer. There is a one page introduction which, in addition to providing an overview of the rest of the book, offers a little insight into why Seltzer likes signs and why you might, too. This introduction page and a few near the book’s end where the subject is preservation are the only pictureless pages in the book. The other pages are filled with roughly 175 color photographs divided into five chapters. The first of these, “Types of Signs”, is where I got the idea of the book as a primer. Examples of bulb, opal letter, mechanical, and other types of signs appear with descriptive text. It prepares the reader for recognizing the various types in the wild and also provides a little history of advertising and the sign industry.

The next three chapters form what Selzer refers to as the “theme” section of the book. One chapter focuses on “People” with sub-themes like chefs, women, cowboys, and Indians. I was a little surprised with the statement that “There are far fewer representations of women than men on surviving vintage signs”, and considered why that was so. For starters, most of those chefs, cowboys, and Indians are male. The neon women my male mind first thought of were bathing beauties diving into motel swimming pools. Women are portrayed in other roles but not often. Evidence, I suppose, of women being even more underrepresented in the ’40s , ’50s, and ’60s, when most of these signs were made, than today.

The “Animals” chapter is probably my favorite. Colorful birds, fish, and dogs draw customers to businesses of all sorts. Sequenced neon segments can make birds appear to fly and dogs and horses appear to run. A pig almost always indicates a BBQ restaurant although one sign shows a line of pigs merrily leaping in to a grinder to be made into sausage.

“Things” is as varied as you might imagine. Bowling balls and pins are popular as are skates, cars, and assorted food items. Donuts and ice cream cones seem to be the most common edibles used to attract customers. Bowling balls lend themselves to animation and when a neon bowling ball rolls, a strike is virtually guaranteed. Together, “Types of Signs” and the three chapters of the “theme” section make up a sort of sampler of the massive Roadside Architecture site. Picking less than 200 images to populate this sampler had to be tough but the choices made were excellent.

Like the signs themselves, the color photographs snag a reader’s attention. They’re all good eye-candy and some, like those with running animals, flying footballs, or operating machinery, require some amount of study. The pictures are far from alone, however. Every picture has an extended caption that describes the sign, often tells its history, and sometimes includes more general information. As Seltzer tells it, “I snuck facts and history into captions which makes it easier to swallow.” Easy to swallow describes the whole book. Even though it may look like a picture book, it seems quite natural to read it front to back and absorb those “facts and history” along with the images.

The last chapter, “Preserving Vintage Signs”, has those pictureless pages I mentioned earlier. It begins with a couple of pages of text that is sort of a “state of the signs” message. Here Seltzer tells of what has been happening to signs and why. The last page is also all text with some answers to the question “What can I do?” In between are descriptions, with pictures, of the big three sign museums in the country: The American Sign Museum (where I bought my copy of the book) in Cincinnati, OH, the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, CA, and the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, NV. The whole chapter, and the final page in particular, might just be the inspiration someone needs to get involved is saving or documenting vintage signs.

So I’m thinking that some folks will get inspiration from this book, some will use it as a shopping list for their own sign hunting, for some it will be an introductory primer into the world of signs, and others might see it as a sampler of the full Roadside Architecture web presence. Those are all valid uses for the book and it will satisfy all of them quite nicely. Of course, some might see the book purely as a nice presentation of some very pretty pictures. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. With the few exceptions noted, there are pretty pictures on every page.

Vintage Signs of America, Debra Jane Seltzer, Amberley Publishing, April 1, 2018, 9.2 x 6.5 inches, 96 pages, ISBN 978-1445669489
Available through Amazon.