Duck Duck Book

Tools of the imagination : drawing tools and technologies from the eighteenth century to the present / Susan C. Piedmont-Palladino, editor.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2007.
[MCL call number: 720.28 T671 2007; two copies, no holds]

It can be said that tools are simply mundane — they are a means to an end and nothing more.  But it’s also true that a dedicated practitioner of a particular craft is likely to develop a preference for particular types of tools, and eventually to come to rely on a beloved individual ruler or chisel or level or brush or what have you.  Why do artists become so passionate about their preferences for one sort of tool over another, so devoted to their own beloved instruments?  Habit, tradition, the preferences of one’s teachers, and other factors all surely have a role.  But another reason is that people who create know their work.  They are specialists in the fabrication of their own craft, and therefore they understand why one pencil is good for line sketching, while another is best reserved for lettering, and a third for shading. 

Many people who regularly use tools also find themselves building tools, devising new variations on old tools, and sharing their tool-making skills with other craftspeople.  In a sense, these artists have two media: the medium in which they engage their artistic energy (painting, sculpture, music, carpentry, or whatever), and the medium of tool-making.  An appreciation of this latter art is the inspiration for Tools of the Imagination — essentially it is an historical and thematic exhibition of architects’ and draftsmen’s tools.  Tools for inscribing circles, arcs, and spirals make up the first chapter, tools for creating straight lines the next, and so on. Many of the tools included are outdated, but ingenious — like the graceful volutor (on pages 16-17), which draws spirals, or the pantograph (pages 82-83), a mechanical device that looks like a large, frightening insect, which assists the artist with hand-drawn enlargements and reductions.  All in all, the tool portraits are lovely and fascinating.

Unfortunately, though the book presents an elegant array of antique tools and does a decent job showcasing contemporary tools, there seems to be a bit of a gap between tools used before about 1900, and those used after the beginning of the computer revolution in the early 1960s.  While reading I often found myself wondering what lay in that gap.   Would a compass manufactured in 1930 or 1970 or 2000 look significantly different than the compasses from 1850 (on page 8) and 1890 (page 10)?  I might find out elsewhere, but there is very little in Tools of the Imagination to enlighten me.

Tools of the Imagination also suffers a bit from its own high design.  The text is printed in silver ink, which is beautiful but can be hard to read when the light conditions aren’t entirely perfect.  This isn’t really a severe handicap, but it does highlight how endless the pursuit of good design can be — a book is a physical object, part of its strength is its portability; yet this book has been made so that it is hard to read under low light or in bright sun, thus decreasing the strength of portability in this particular book.  I found this rather ironic, considering the topic at hand. 

Simple shelters : tents, tipis, yurts, domes and other ancient homes / written and illustrated by Jonathan Horning ; with additional material by Brock Horning.
New York : Walker & Co., 2009.
[MCL call number: 728 H8163s 2009; six copies, no holds]

Sound housing is one of humanity’s most basic needs, and yet city people here in the developed world often have very little notion of how even the most traditional and well-tested simple structures are actually constructed.  If you find this troublesome, begin your own self-education with Simple Shelters.  Jonathan Horning describes twenty or so traditional structures, geodesic and other domes, straw bale houses, provides a brief explanation of a variety of cladding types, and a short discussion of house orientation.  The text is useful, but Horning’s drawings of each structure are the real lure of the book.  His illustrations are lucid; particularly the detailed diagrams of the joints, ties, braces, and other component parts of each different shelter.  Simple Shelters is itself quite simple — short, quick, and earnest — but it is well worth your attention.

Cities from the sky : an aerial portrait of America / by Thomas J. Campanella ; foreword by Witold Rybczynski.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2001.
[MCL call number: 779.36 C186c 2001; one copy, no holds]

There is something magical about the way the earth appears as you look out from an airplane.  If you’ve flown before, you know what I mean, even if your only experiences have been in commercial jets with teensy little windows. Flying home to Portland, I nearly always find myself taken aback at the familiar but fairly awesome vista when the plane comes through the last layer of clouds and I can see the Willamette River stretched out along the valley, and the clutch of downtown skyscrapers snug between the river and the West Hills; or, approaching from the east, the incredible view of mountains all around as the plane descends over the Columbia.  Flying over your hometown in a small plane is often even better — little planes are able to dart about a bit, and they fly low, so you might be able to pick out the apple tree in your front yard, a familiar church steeple, or the playground in a local park.

Aerial photographs can give you a taste of this feeling of flying without ever leaving the ground.  Before Mapquest, before Google Earth and Multimap and all the other amazing mapping services on the world wide web, aerial surveys were special, restricted resources that most folks had very little chance to enjoy.  You might have gone to a library to look up a United States Geological Survey orthophotoquad, or you might have seen the occasional aerial survey photograph illustrating a news article or in a historical museum; but comprehensive aerial surveys used to be the provenance of specialists.  Engineers, city planners, military officials, land developers; people with a clear practical need for the information aerial photographs could provide, and with the money to fund them.

When specialists needed aerial photographs in decades past, often as not they hired Fairchild Aerial Surveys to provide them.  Cities From the Sky begins with an introductory essay explaining Fairchild’s history — and it was a pretty interesting company.  Its founder, Sherman Fairchild, spent his youth tinkering, building things, and inventing small devices of one sort or another.  After developing a new and greatly improved aerial camera for the U.S. Army Air Service, he founded the Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation in 1920, which made cameras, accepted commissions for aerial images, and took aerial photographs on speculation for use in newspaper stories.  The spec photos were preserved in the company’s picture library whether or not they sold, and this vast collection of images (more than 200,000 by 1935) are the pool from which most of the content of Cities From the Sky is drawn.

The book includes about 100 giant pages of reproductions of aerial photographs, most of them angled views showing a panorama rather than the map-like earth-from-space kind.  They capture cities and towns across the United States, though about 40% are of communities in the Northeast.  The photographs would be interesting to look at just for their vantage points, but in fact they are fascinating for their historic value as well.  The great majority were taken between 1930 and 1955 or so, and so they often include geographical, urban, and societal elements that are no longer present, or that have been irrevocably changed by later developments: the San Francisco Bay has no bridges; Monterey, California’s harbor is full of fishing boats resting from their labors in the still-active sardine industry (page 108); a U.S. Navy dirigible floats above the Hudson River in New York (page 35); downtown St. Louis is missing its Gateway Arch (page 84); Los Angeles’s Harbor Freeway is actively under construction (page 115); and the trains leaving Boston’s North Station are sending out enormous, picturesque plumes of steam (page 21).

* * *

Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc. left a considerable record of its activities, and several libraries and archives have digitized part or all of their collections of Fairchild photographs, including the New York Public Library, the Digital Collections of the New York State Archives, Museum, and Library, Whittier College, and the Santa Monica Public Library.

* * *

Those of you who’d like to see more pictures of cities from high up in the sky should be sure to take a look at Bird’s Eye Views, by John W. Reps, (New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c1998, reviewed in number 53), which reproduces 19th and early 20th century lithographs showing American cities and towns.

The look of love : the art of the romance novel / by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 741.64 M159L 2002; one copy, no holds]

Lots of people enjoy romance, but few people in our culture would easily admit to being lovers of the straight-up romance novel, unless they fit a particular profile.  Women can read them, but not feminists.  Girls can read them, but not boys.  You don’t read romances if you’re interested in “real” literature, and you don’t read them if you’re really smart and intellectual.  Romances are formulaic and hackneyed, they present a narrow view of marriage, of love, of a woman’s ability to have a mind and a heart at the same time, and so on.

But still, millions of people read romances, and enjoy them.  Part of the appeal, not surprisingly, is their evocative cover design — like their brethren in the rest of the pulp novel world, romances have long been sold on the strength of their beautiful illustrated covers.  The Look of Love presents a nice exhibit of some of the best, and some of the most typical romance covers from the 1930s to the 1980s, along with a short history of the genre and some discussion of trends in cover design over the years.  The explication is interesting and useful, but the covers are really the book’s reason d’être.

Some are so much of another era that it’s hard to see them as anything but arch and ironic:  Nurse on the Run (1965, page 93) features a beautiful young woman in a whirling, startled pose, with red hair spilling out from underneath her nurse’s cap.  Behind her are superimposed three calm, suave fellows, apparently the source of her turmoil (though none of them appear to have a care in the world).   And the very first Harlequin (1949, page 11) is illustrated with a painting of a woman in evening dress at the top of a curving staircase.  At the bottom is a man in a blue suit with a cap — he looks like a postal carrier to me, but here’s the title: The Manatee: Strange Loves of a Seaman.  So he must be a sea captain, not a mailman; I trust the woman is not actually the manatee.

Irony aside, however, there is a particular beauty about these illustrations.  Some of this is due to the vintage, nostalgic quality of the art, no doubt enhanced by the plain fact that these days it’s unusual for newly published books of any sort to have pulp-style hand-painted covers*, but I think the idea love itself  is part of the appeal.  The cover evokes the feeling that the story promises to bring out in the reader.  The cover painting shows just a glimmer, a teensy frame out of the story — a longing glance at the unrequited beloved; a bit of labor shared by colleagues who maybe want to know one another better; the second two doomed lovers who are nonetheless magnetically attracted are just about to kiss.  All of these moments are worth looking at, worth fantasizing about, worth mention in life generally; even if the particular situation being described in the cover painting is highly improbable and stereotypical, and even though novel  itself might not be so great.

* Though there are counter-examples to this point — one I think of immediately is Hard Case Crime, which publishes both reprints and new novels in the mystery/crime genre, each with a specially commissioned painted cover.  I have found their books very much worth reading, as well as worth appreciating as lovely objects.

I shot a man in Reno : a history of death by murder, suicide, fire, flood, drugs, disease, and general misadventure, as related in popular song / Graeme Thomson.
New York : Continuum, 2008.
[MCL call number: 782.42164 T483i 2008; two copies, no holds]

When I was a teenager, my mother made a mix tape labeled “Death” on one side and “Suicide” on the other.  It was for a road trip, but she had it for years and I always loved it.  Ever since I first heard this tape, I’ve been building a play list in my mind of all the other death and suicide songs I’d use, if I were to make my own tape.  I don’t think I’ll ever actually record my own version, but the songs are lodged in a special place in my brain, asserting their relatedness to me every time the subject arises.  I have other lists — songs about living through a violent revolution, songs that list lots of place names, songs appreciating difficult women, songs about sex that rely entirely on metaphor to get their nasty across, songs describing famous disasters, songs about the historical Jesus Christ, and so on — but the death and suicide songs are the most assertive, and the longest, list.

Graeme Thompson shares this interest in death songs.  I Shot a Man in Reno is his take on the history, meaning, and social significance of death songs.  He considers songs about suicide, murder, drinking yourself to death, the afterlife, mourning, and songs people want to have played at their funerals.  Overall, it’s a pretty useful tour of death songs and what they mean in a cultural context, but I can’t say I loved the book.  Really I think it’s just a question of taste — I didn’t find Thompson to be the most intriguing or well-rounded cultural or musical observer, so his critical analysis didn’t jazz me.  I’m not going to recommend him enthusiastically, but I wouldn’t tell you not to read the book either.  I’m sure it would suit other readers just fine.

However, I didn’t like it much.  The thing I really couldn’t get over is actually quite petty.

Thompson promises in his introduction that I Shot a Man in Reno will not be merely a list disguised as a book.  It is in fact a thematic history, not simply a list, but still it is true that when he gets really in the thick of his subject, Thompson tends to resort to listing songs, and it pretty much sucks.  I can hardly cry foul very loudly here — when it comes to lists-posing-as-meaningful-prose I do, as regular readers have no doubt noted, live in something of a glass house.  But really, Thompson’s listy bits seem designed specifically to invoke a mood in the reader.  It’s as if he wants you to remember the songs, hear their melodies, recall their words.  Great, if you’re familiar with them all, but kind of lame if you’re not.  And I have a hard time imagining how anyone who is not a music critic or historian could possibly know all or even most of the specific songs Thompson mentions.  It’s a pretty widely-ranging catalog.

It’s ironic, really, that this is the part that chafes — I was sort of hoping, when I picked up the book, that I would be exposed to some new songs, right along with a nice bit of analysis of death songs, a history of their roots, some stories about what they have meant to us, why they matter, and so on.  Really I was hoping to learn about songs I’d never heard of before.  And I did, but all I really learned  about the songs Thompson lists is who wrote and sang them, their titles, and a teeny tiny bit about how they relate to the subject of death.  I don’t know how popular they have been or what effect they’ve had on society, I don’t know the lyrics, and most importantly, I don’t know what they sound like.

It might be that Thompson listed lots of songs so that one or two of them would catch in the reader’s mind, and they’d be able to see the specifics of his point at that moment in the narrative.  But for me, reading the list was like the literary equivalent of a conversation with someone who knows tons and tons about something, but can’t lay off the jargon enough to be able to talk with someone uninitiated with that subject.  Perhaps I Shot a Man in Reno could benefit from a companion CD?  It is hard to imagine getting the rights for all those hopelessly copyrighted songs, but it might help solve the problem.

Lavoirs : washhouses of rural France / Mireille Roddier ; foreword by Billie Tsien.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2003.
[MCL call number: 720.944 R686L 2003: one copy, no holds]

In the 17th century, local governments in France began to build a new kind of municipal facility: lavoirs, or washhouses.  They were simple, solid affairs (usually built of stone) designed to channel water for from streams and rivers into large basins, or catch it when it rained.  Housewives and professional wash-women came to these communal facilities to launder clothing and linens, and they remained in use, in some places, until the time of the Second World War.

Many, many lavoirs have been demolished, but some remain, especially in smaller and more remote towns, and in towns where the lavoir was built together with another facility such as the town hall.  For those of us who cannot make a tour of lavoirs, Mireille Roddier carefully and beautifully photographed several dozen for her book Lavoirs: Washhouses of Rural France.

I found the images startling — the buildings themselves are lovely in a utilitarian way, but noticing this, I also can’t help but notice that they are not being used.  In every picture, the water in the basins and channels are still, and the large rooms are empty of people and laundry.  The photographs look quiet, exactly the opposite of how they must have been when in use, full of women working, talking, splashing water; maybe laughing or singing or arguing.  It’s eerie to see pictures of these lovely buildings with their picturesque pools and rills glassy and smooth in a way they would originally have been only at the start of the workday, or at night.

The bulk of Roddier’s photographs are preceded by an essay explaining the history of lavoirs as buildings and as civic facilities, regional variations in architectural style, and other architectural matters.  The essay also discusses the social impacts of lavoirs, together with a brief history of their use and a bit of explanation of the place laundresses held in French society during the period when lavoirs were common and in regular use.  All this is fascinating, and useful for explaining just what is represented in Roddier’s photographs, but the book would be worthwhile just for the beauty of those photographs.

45 RPM : a visual history of the seven-inch record / edited by Spencer Drate.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 741.66 F745 2002; one copy, no holds]

The 45 was once the very height of pop music cool.  Singles were cheap, easy to carry around, and provided a quick musical fix without the commitment of an LP.  If you wanted a hit, it came on a 45, adulterated only by a (usually) forgettable song on the B-side; whereas LPs were full of all kinds of non-hit nonsense you’d never hear on the radio.

But in addition to filling a particular musical niche, 45s were physical objects as well.  Albums have album covers, where great strides in graphic design can be made.  Or sometimes, not made.  45 RPM chronicles the evolution of singles’ cover art, from the 1950s when classical, jazz, dance music, and pop were all put out on seven-inch records; through the 60s, 70s, and 80s when Top 40 hits were all available as singles; and finally to the 1990s, when 45s were an important medium of the alternative music scene.

The images in 45 RPM are widely varied.  Two Frank Sinatra records (on facing pages) feature lovely painted covers that look like nothing so much as hard-boiled pulp novels.  Duke Ellington is caught in a terribly modern candid photograph, hatted, smoking while sitting at his piano and not looking at the camera at all. Fabian, Elvis Presley, Chubby Checker, Paul Anka, and Roy Orbison gaze directly at us, gorgeous and wholesome but maybe a little dangerous with their hair pomaded and sweet smiles on their faces.  The Rolling Stones and Sam the Sham and the Pharos are all dressed up in costume.  The Foundations, The Yard Birds, The Impressions, and America are just standing around in very stylish looking groups, as if their carefully arranged portraits were wholly candid.  Al Green is relaxing in a white chair in a white room wearing a white suit and white shoes, radiating calm and cool.  The B-52s are half cartoons. The Clash have assumed the position, hands up against the wall and facing away from the camera. In the selection of covers from the 90s, artists don’t appear at all — Instead there are cartoons, mock newspaper advertisements, photo montages, and a little more artsy irony than is perhaps truly necessary.

The record cover images are arranged in groups, by decade.  Within each section, however, there is no firm logic apparent in the arrangement — if there are several records from a particular artist or group within a decade, they’re usually shown one after another, but that seems to be it.  This is unfortunate, especially in the first decade during which the range of genres is broad.  Also, each 45 cover is shown solo, with no caption or explanation accompanying it.  This successfully highlights the visual aspect of the covers, but since some of them are completely wordless, it’s a little frustrating if you don’t recognize the band or the record.  There is a discography in the back of the book readers can use to track down which record is what, but it doesn’t list page numbers or other clear identifying data, and flipping back and forth is inconvenient.

On the other hand, I will say that after looking through the book, I had a whole afternoon’s worth of songs playing in my head.  Maybe visual stimulation is a really good way to get my brain to start replaying what it knows?  I can’t say, but I will tell you that I as I type I’ve got Ella Fitzgerald doing “Cheek to Cheek,” Talking Heads with “Take Me to the River,” Tom Jones’s “She’s a Lady,” Aretha Franklin doing “Freeway of Love,” Nat King Cole singing “Unforgettable,” Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades,” and Elvis Presley’s “Are you Lonesome Tonight,” all playing in the jukebox of my mind.  Catchy.

Soviet textiles : designing the modern utopia : selected from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection / Pamela Jill Kachurin.
Boston : MFA Publications ; New York : Trade distribution : Distributed Art Publishers/D.A.P., c2006. [MCL call number: 746.0947 K11s 2006; one copy, one hold]

Oh, it’s so easy to understand the pull of the Soviet dream of a workers paradise when looking at the cream of socialist-realist art/propaganda.  Handsome tractors surging across uniformly fruitful fields, little stylized children in geometric smocks playing ball, gracefully belching smokestacks; all are repeated in bright, modern colors across expanses of plain, honest cotton fabric.  The world depicted here is productive and prosperous.  Children have time for play as well as learning, adults find joy in shared work; and no one knows want or cold or psychological despair.

In the brief period from about 1927 to 1933, Soviet designers engaged in a bold experiment — rather than continue to produce the floral patterns that had always been popular, they designed fabrics featuring collective farms and factories and their generous product, and other modern ideals.  The notion was that these assertively socialist textiles, provided for everyday use, would help to radicalize and educate the population at large. Soviet Textiles provides a terse, cogent history of this movement, its origins, and its demise — gracefully illustrated, of course, with images of an idealized art deco cotton utopia on nearly every page.

Photobooth / Babbette Hines.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.
[MCL call number: 779.2 H662p 2002; one copy, one hold]

I’m not sure I have much to say about Photobooth — though I can describe it, and I will shortly — the main reason for mentioning it here is simply that it is lovely and surprising and you are many of you very likely to miss it unless you have it pointed out.

You’ve been to a photobooth; everyone has.  It’s a big box, as big, perhaps, as a car.  You slide into it (maybe you jam yourself in with several of your closest friends), decide which color of curtain you’d like behind you, feed your quarters into the slot, and sit, pose, or mug while the box flashes at you once for each pose.  Then you clamber out and wait impatiently for roughly two minutes while the box processes your negatives, prints them, and finally ejects a thin strip of pictures.  They are probably over- or underexposed, blurry, or unflattering in some way.  The paper is wet.  They’re cheap, entertaining, useful, and eminently ephemeral.

Babbette Hines collects other people’s photobooth pictures, and Photobooth is an exhibit of her collection.  They cover roughly 200 pages. Some are shown front and back to show notes people wrote on them, some are set in frames or pasted on to cards bearing messages.  They show babies, lovers, holiday-makers, soldiers and sailors, friends, and single individuals.  Some are serious, some are silly, some are poignant.  Some look as though they are meant to grace a passport or other official document, some were clearly taken only for amusement, some are completely inscrutable as to intent.

You must get this book, because you must see these pictures.

* * *

Or you could get this one:

American photobooth / Näkki Goranin ; foreword by David Haberstich.
New York : W. W. Norton & Co., c2008.
[MCL call number: 779.2 G661a 2008; five copies, no holds]

It has a smidge fewer photobooth pictures, but it begins with a much more substantive introductory chapter, with a technical and historical discussion of the invention of the photobooth and its development as a commercial enterprise.  The author, Näkki Goranin, is herself an photobooth artist, and several of her self-portraits are included in the book.

The forgotten arts and crafts / John Seymour.
New York : Dorling Kindersley, 2001.
[MCL call number: 745.5 S519f 2001; five copies, no holds]

One side effect of a curious mind is that it can be difficult to shake off idle questions.  How do you properly thatch a roof?  Were there once different kinds of thimbles for different sewing tasks?  Is there a non-electric ancestor to the vacuum cleaner?  But there is hope if your idly questioning mind inclines this particular way — these and many similar questions can be answered by consulting John Seymour’s The Forgotten Arts and Crafts.

In straightforward prose and clear illustrations, Seymour explains how things used to be made and repaired, who did the work, and a bit about their daily experiences.  The book includes traditional arts, crafts and homemade products primarily from the western Europe and the cultures it has spawned, but this narrow focus allows for greater depth – for example, there are two pages on boot and shoemaking, and an additional two pages on clog making.  And there’s a nice sidebar in the clog section about clogs made entirely of wood (with no leather upper part), and how they were called sabots in France, which gave rise to the word “sabotage,” because a clog is a handy weapon when you’re an oppressed worker.  Well, Seymour doesn’t put it exactly like that, but you see what I mean.

The Forgotten Arts and Crafts is nice to leaf through, but it might also prove useful if you really do have a question like “what sort of tools might one use to make large quantities of butter by hand?”  And there is an index, as well as an detailed table of contents and lots of arresting illustrations, so you should be able to find what you need in short order.

* * *

If you need to know more about the workings of mundane technology, with a more modern bent, you would do well to consult David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work, which explains the how of everything from simple machines to the space shuttle.

The dawn of the color photograph : Albert Kahn’s archives of the planet / David Okuefuna.
Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2008.
[MCL call number: 779.092 K12o 2008: six copies, no holds]

In the first few years of the 20th century, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented autochrome photography, a simple, inexpensive method for making color photographs with a standard glass-negative camera (the sort used by professionals at the time).  The autochrome was a radical development — other color photography techniques existed, but they were expensive, complicated, and/or cumbersome.

Inspired in part by this technological development, French banker, pacifist, and philanthropist Albert Kahn conceived of an ambitious project — he recruited and financed professional photographers, provided them with autochrome plates and other equipment, and sent them around the world to photograph everyday life.   From 1908 through the 1930s, these photographers recorded world events, wars (most notably the First World War), political change, religious practice, commonplace cultural events, national festivals, people at work, and of course the landscape of houses, streets, neighborhoods, cities, agricultural land, and the natural world.  The project was named The Archives of the Planet, and eventually grew to more than 72,000 images.

The Archive’s photographers traveled far and wide, to teeny villages as well as important cities in nearly every corner of the world, and their work captures a world that is roughly a century old.  European imperialism, the massive bombing campaigns of the Second World War, the spread of Western popular culture, industrialization, the Cold War, pollution, globalization and many other forces have made changes both to our cultural and physical geography.  The Dawn of the Color Photograph collects hundreds of these pictures and presents them in a geographical arrangement, with David Okuefuna’s meticulous captions showing not only where and what is portrayed in each image, but often explaining how history has treated the buildings, cities, cultural traditions, and communities captured therein.  It’s easier to understand what’s in the pictures with this bit of explication — at times Okuefuna reads quite a lot into the images, making assessments of people’s state of mind from their expressions, for example, but on the whole his captions are helpful and illustrative.

But the pictures themselves are frankly astonishing.  The autochrome process* produces very different images than the color photographs we’re used to.  The images are muted and romantic looking; a bit grainy.  Even scenes that are brightly lit with full sunlight do not seem harsh – colors meld a little, and look more harmonious than they generally do in life.  Autochromes require a long exposure time, so some of the images are clearly posed – and those that are not often include blurred shapes where people or animals moved during the exposure.  The strange colors and long exposure combine to give the photographs a well-put-together look, a bit like theater promotion stills or fashion magazine shots.  And yet most of the images are startlingly natural looking.  The majority capture scenes of life as it is lived — marketplaces, people at work, street scenes — most of these seem as natural as they would captured in a fraction of a modern second by an amateur with a Brownie or an iPhone.

I looked through The Dawn of the Color Photograph several times before I felt ready to write about it.  The first time, I simply flipped through and looked at the pictures.  The second time, I read the introduction and the essays at the beginning of each chapter, and looked at the photographs more carefully.  The third time, I went through the whole book and read each photograph caption.  The fourth time, I flipped through again and revisited the images which had struck me most.  I am not sure that I am done; I’m not sure I have seen even a substantial part of what is available to see in this collection of images.  These pictures are very energetic and lifelike, and even though the people are mostly dead, many of the buildings and communities are scattered or destroyed, and the world is unalterably changed by time and other forces, these people and places do not seem gone.  They seem real, alive, present.  The people seem human, their cultures important, their habits interesting, their perspectives valuable.  I think this is the magic that Albert Kahn was hoping to create.

* * *

* There is an appendix explaining the technical aspects of the autochrome process, which helps illuminate why the images look the way they do — and of course it’s also interesting because autochromes work so very differently than the photographic processes we typically use today.

One thousand years of manga / Brigitte Koyama-Richard ; [translated from the French by David Radzinowicz].
Paris : Flammarion ; [New York] : distributed in North America by Rizzoli International Publications, c2007.
[MCL call number: 741.5952 K88o 2007; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

If you pick up a brand-new Japanese comic book and read it, my guess is that you are more likely to enjoy the story, the writing, or the art than you are to consider its historical antecedents.

If I am wrong, or if my pointing this out inspires you to explore the history of manga, Brigitte Koyama-Richard is at your service. Koyama-Richard traces manga’s roots back to the magnificent story scrolls painted 800 to 1,000 years ago exclusively for the enjoyment of elite audiences, through the establishment of printmaking as a popular art, the “golden age of caricature” and the opening of Japan to the west in the 1800s, the rise of the comic strip in the early 1900s, the work of the highly influential writer/artist Tezuka Osamu, and finally, contemporary Japanese comics.

Throughout this tour of artistic formats, political and technological developments, and cultural change, Koyama-Richard provides comparisons between the Japanese artworks that are her main focus, and well-known examples of European art that are contemporary to them. These comparisons are helpful for western readers who are ignorant of the existence and significance of major Japanese works, allowing a gentle introduction that encourages a developing understanding of the significance and context of seminal Japanese cultural icons — from treasures of history like the thousand year old scroll Choju jinbutsu giga (Frolicking Animals and People), to modern masterpieces like Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy).

A large percentage of the text in One Thousand Years of Manga is in its carefully written picture captions, which provide bits of history, biography, and thoughtful criticism of the images that appear on nearly every page. But the essays explaining each chapter in manga’s long history are clear and interesting as well, and the pictures — reproductions of scrolls, paintings, prints, comic strips, books, sketches, and many other incredible artworks — are incredible.

At the back of the book are a series of interviews with manga artists, a short essay about western influences on Japanese comics, a glossary of Japanese terms used in the book, a very brief overview of historical Japanese political eras, a biographical glossary of artists, a manga chronology, some selected manga statistics from Japan, and a bilingual bibliography. Even with all this magnificent endmatter, there is no index; but the book is well organized enough that it is hardly to be missed.

Self portrait in a velvet dress : Frida’s wardrobe : fashion from the Museo Frida Kahlo / [editors, Denise Rosenzweig, Magdalena Rosenzweig].
San Francisco, CA : Chronicle Books, 2008.
[MCL call number: 759.972 K12s 2008; three copies, one hold]

Frida Kahlo’s house, the Casa Azul, is now a museum. It is the house where Kahlo was born, and it is where she died. Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, stipulated that her bedroom and bathroom should not be opened until fifty years after her death. So the rooms were locked and their contents left in place until 2004. When the museum’s staff finally entered Kahlo’s rooms, they found nearly 150 articles of clothing, dozens of household linens, a goodly collection of orthopedic equipment and hospital miscellanea, dozens of bottles of cosmetics and medicine, and a huge lithograph showing human embryonic development.

Kahlo’s clothes were the most notable prize. They were not so much a wardrobe in the normal sense as they were a collection — although it is certainly true that she wore these clothes, rather than collecting them as mere objects. And this makes the collection, and the book about it, feel rather strange. On the one hand, a museum devoted to a great personage is almost guaranteed to make relics out of any mundane object associated with that person, and the reverence with which this is done can border on the ridiculous. On the other hand, it is clear that Kahlo herself valued her wardrobe as more than simply a collection of garments to cover her nakedness and keep her warm. There is no doubt that part of what makes Frida Kahlo such an icon is that her attitude toward dress, style, art, and personal presentation was so enigmatic. Of course we would celebrate and carefully examine her clothing, now that we can. They have so much to say to us about
Kahlo as a person, and as an artist.

A large portion of Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress is taken up with Marta Turok’s essay on the ethnic roots of Frida Kahlo’s wardrobe. Turok discusses the sources of Kahlo’s clothes in different regions of Mexico, Guatemala, and examines what dressing chiefly in folk costume meant in Kahlo’s Mexico. This section contains many facing page illustrations: on one page, a photograph showing Kahlo wearing an article of clothing, or a reproduction of one of her paintings in which it figured; on the page opposite, a photograph of the item (or a similar one) after museum staff entered Kahlo’s rooms to observe and catalog her personal things. Other essays discuss Kahlo’s style of dress, the discoveries museum staff made the day they opened Kahlo’s rooms, and the restoration of the clothing and objects found there.

Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress is like a biography of Kahlo, with an emphasis on a specific part of her approach to the world: it is about Kahlo’s blouses, her shoes, her skirts, her belts, her scarves; and the way she used them to create a specific presentation of “Frida Kahlo” to her self, her family, her friends, and the public. Of course the book is beautiful; it’s full of lovely photographs of beautiful objects, it has the glitter of Kahlo’s fame and the sharp taste of her public tragedies. But it is also interesting as an exploration of a slender but important piece of a powerful artist’s creative vision, and the tools she employed to practice it.

Unbuilt America : forgotten architecture in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to the space age : a book / by Alison Sky and Michelle Stone ; introd. by George R. Collins.
New York : McGraw-Hill, c1976.
[MCL call number: 720.973 S629u; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

Architects are planners — they are not traditionally responsible for doing the work of organizing and carrying out construction of their designs. In the course of their training and professional lives, most architects have designed buildings, monuments, or even whole cities that have never been built. Unbuilt America collects more than 200 designs that remain in the idea stage, each with illustrations and a description written by the architect, a contemporary critic, or a later historian.

The book’s contents are heavy with unbuilt creations of the 1960s and 1970s, for example: General Electric’s undersea community Bottom-Fix (page 100), Bruce Goff’s design for a Cowboy Hall of Fame shaped like a pile of horseshoes around a stake (page 106-107), James Lambeth’s hillside passive-solar village (page 158), Claes Oldenburg’s Design for a Tunnel Entrance in the Shape of a Nose (page 196), and several fascinating designs for structures celebrating the United States bicentennial (pages 248-261). But older unrealized plans are included too, notably Jacques J. B. Benedict’s Summer Capitol for President Wilson (pages 42-43), Frank Hemle and Harvey Wiley Corbett’s Restoration of King Solomon’s Temple and Citadel (pages 128-131), and Robert Stacy-Judd’s plans for cityscapes based on ancient Mayan architecture (235-237). All in all, it is an intriguing orientation to a series of curious and beautiful buildings and city plans.

Berlin Games : how the Nazis stole the Olympic dream / Guy Walters.
New York : William Morrow, c2006.
[MCL call number: 796.48 W235b 2006; one copy, two holds]

In the spring of 1931, twenty powerful men made their way to Barcelona for a meeting of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Their task was to decide which city would host the 1936 Olympic Games. Four were under serious consideration: Rome, Budapest, Barcelona, and Berlin. Italian members demurred that Rome was not ready to host the games in 1936, and the Hungarian representative voiced support for holding the games in Berlin. When the votes were finally counted (gathering them took several weeks, as many representatives voted by mail or telegram), Berlin was the clear winner, with 43 of 59 votes cast for the German capital.

In 1936, Spain held a general election, which resulted in the formation of a left-wing Popular Front government. The new Spanish government was sharply opposed to the politics and policies of Nazi Germany, and forbid Spanish athletes from participating in the Berlin Olympics — so they organized an alternative festival, to be held in Barcelona: the People’s Olympic Games. The People’s Olympics were planned for July 19-26, but a few short days before the games were to commence right-wing Nationalists, who controlled most of the Spanish army, began the rebellion that became the Spanish Civil War. By July 19, they held several cities and fighting had broken out across the country. The war was to last three years. Mexico and the Soviet Union were the only countries to come to the aid of Republican Spain, although tens of thousands of leftists from around the world traveled to Spain to fight against General Francisco Franco and the Nationalists, as international volunteers.

I initially turned to Guy Walters’s history of the 1936 Berlin Olympics to learn more about the People’s Olympics. Who planned them? Was any part of the festival salvaged? What countries hoped to participate? What happened to foreign athletes who were already in Spain when the war broke out? Walters answers these questions, but his larger project of relating the history of the Nazi games is worthy of attention as well.

Like most Olympic festivals, Berlin’s was a major national endeavor. Vast sports complexes were erected, armies of young translators were trained, and towns along the route visiting athletes took to the games were prettied up. But the young regime had an awfully big chip on its shoulder too — after all, the 1916 Olympics had been slated for Berlin, only to be cancelled by the IOC after World War I lost its gentlemanly edge with Germany’s introduction of mustard gas as a weapon. The German establishment needed this Olympics to come off perfectly to show how much the country had changed. And so, German prosperity was highlighted — butter and other foods were hoarded in advance so there would be plenty for the athletes and international visitors. The sharp edges of Nazi policies about racial purity were softened up temporarily, for show. Jewish athletes who had been forced out of participating in German sport under the Nazis were compelled to compete for their country, to prove that Germany was playing fair. A few weeks before the games began, Sinti and Roma people in the Berlin area were rounded up and placed in a special camp in a suburb. Homeless people and beggars were cleared from the city’s streets, and more than two thousand prostitutes and women working in the edges of the sex trade were forcibly examined for venereal disease.

Distasteful as this sounds, no doubt the stories of other nations’ Olympic preparations are nearly as shameful. What contrasts the 1936 Olympics from others is the German government’s neat takeover of the entire administration of the games from the International Olympic Committee.

Here’s a taste of the intrigue: in early 1936, it looked as though the two front runners for the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize were Barron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, and Carl von Ossietsky, an anti-Nazi journalist who was then languishing in a German forced labor camp. One of Germany’s representatives to the IOC attempted to use the influence of the IOC to pressure the Nobel committee to award the prize to Coubertin, and bribed the financially stricken Coubertin to formally endorse the Berlin games. Walters says on page 145: “Not only were the games being organised by the regime, but they were also being run according to Nazi rules and not those of the IOC. Four thousand athletes would shortly be attending a celebration not only of sport, but of fascism.” (Despite the German IOC members’ machinations, the peace prize was eventually awarded to Ossietzky, in December 1936, well after the games were over.)

Walters tells many other tales of this very politicized Olympiad — of athletes, government ministers, sports officials, businessmen, human rights activists, journalists, intellectuals, and the glitterati, and their role in the actual events of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the public debate that accompanied it.

The text of Berlin Games is followed by a collection of incredibly readable endnotes, a thorough bibliography, and an excellent and helpful index.

Bird’s eye views : historic lithographs of North American cities / John W. Reps.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c1998.
[MCL call number: 769 R425b 1998; one copy, no holds;
one copy reference only at Central Library]

In the nineteenth century, there was an enduring fashion for prints showing cities and towns. From the early 1800s to the early 1900s, as many as 2,400 American towns were immortalized in prints showing industry, progress, order, and civilization, with nice bits of park scattered through the middle and prosperous farm- or rangeland outside. Many of these views show towns and cities from an imaginary point high in the air, presenting the city from its most attractive angle. John W. Reps’s Bird’s Eye Views reproduces 100 or so panoramic views of cities and towns from across the United States and Canada, all of them beautiful, and each one thoroughly annotated with information about the contents of each print and the context in which it was made. After two introductory essays (one on the history of viewmaking, one on the development of urban communities), the prints are presented in four chapters organized by geography.

Many of the bird’s eye view prints of western cities emphasize their geometrical street layouts: Salt Lake City, Prescott, San Jose, and San Diego are all shown with orderly square city blocks of identical size dominating the visual field. Port cities’ waterways are often in the foreground of their portraits: two different prints show Seattle from an imaginary point high above Elliott Bay, with wharves in the foreground, humming with activity from countless ships and trains; while an 1876 view of New York City places Manhattan Island in the center of the picture, stretching from Battery Park right at the viewer’s fingertips all the way along the island to the newly minted Central Park, with the Hudson and East Rivers full to bursting with busy ships. If the city is really famous for just one thing, that might be the focus of an artist’s design: Washington, DC is shown in two views in which the United States Capitol dominates so much that the rest of the city might as well not even be there, and a third in which it is clearly the largest and most important component of the urban landscape (especially since the Washington Monument is shown only half-built).

If a city has railroad yards, port facilities, or smoke-belching factories, they are highlighted to show industry and progress. If it boasts a beautiful sea coast, a graceful arching river, or white-capped mountain views, they will be shown to their full magnificence. If there are many lovely buildings, the bird’s eye view may be surrounded with little portraits of the most noted structures to indicate the heights of culture and seriousness the city has attained. Although these views of towns and cities were not typically produced as advertisements for city governments or real estate developers, they certainly do shout loud and clearly, “Look at this beautiful place! It’s clean! It’s prosperous! It has everything you could want and more — and see, we can prove it!”

Although Bird’s Eye Views is really very large for a commercially published book (33 x 38 cm when closed), the lithographs are reproduced at much smaller than their original size. No doubt this was unavoidable, but it is incredibly frustrating, since part of the charm of the prints is their incredible detail. If you would like to see a selection of city and town bird’s eye views in a format that allows you to examine them more closely (albeit without Reps’s helpful annotations), you might want to visit Panoramic Maps : 1847-1929 at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project (Washington, DC : Geography & Map Division, Library of Congress, 2007). Many of the lithographs in Bird’s Eye Views are also part of the Library of Congress’s digital collection, and I’ve provided links to digital copies of the lithographs mentioned above, when the views were available there.

Mingering Mike / Dori Hadar ; with a preface by Neil Strauss and an afterword by Jane Livingston.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2007.
[MCL call number: 741.66 M664m 2007; three copies, no holds]

I am not at all sure how to properly review this book, it is so odd and beautiful and touching.

Mingering Mike is a soul star, an incredibly successful musician with a string of hit albums and sold-out concert tours, who also found time to write, direct, and star in nine films. His career spanned a brief but very active ten years from the late 1960s to the day in 1977 when he laid down his instruments and retired.

But every one of his dozens of records now function more as visual art objects than anything else, because they are all one-of-a-kind, handmade with pencil, cardboard, and marking pens. The grooves are drawn carefully into each record, liner notes are written out in pen, and a few albums even feature home-made shrink wrap covering the whole gorgeous package. Mingering Mike wrote songs too, for sure, and with his cousin The Big “D” he recorded many tunes at home on reel-to-reel tape, with a backbeat provided by one of them pounding on a mattress or phone book. But the circumstances of everyday life made it difficult for Mike to pursue his dreams of focusing on music and performance, while creating the cardboard albums was a creative outlet that fit relatively neatly into his life.

The book functions somewhat like an exhibition catalog — its main contents are reproductions of Mingering Mike’s album covers, 45s, movie posters, and 8-tracks, interspersed with critical essays about Mike’s life and artwork, followed by a complete discography.

The records (to judge by their covers, at least) are widely varied, some serious, some funny, some romantic, and some downright angry. Mingering Mike’s genius is partly in his song titles: “Last Night I Thought I Was Bruce,” “While Waiting for the Bus,” “222 Love Avenue,” “Eat Now and Eat Later,” “3 Footsteps Away from the Altar,” “Do the Nixon” (from the album Boogie Down at the White House), and my favorite, “It’s a Good Thing Mike and Big D Weren’t Here Because They Both Would Have Been Wasted.” And this is not just lightweight pop music — in addition to writing songs and creating albums and films about love, dancing, and having a good time, Mingering Mike also tackled the negative impact of drug abuse in the black community, the toll of the Vietnam War, sickle cell anemia, and many other political and social issues. The albums show Mike as an honest, three-dimensional artist unafraid to speak his piece and bare his soul to his fans. You will be a fan too, once you have a few minutes to get to know his work.

* * *

Mingering Mike has a webpage as well, where you can listen to some of his actual recordings and view many album covers and other pieces of Mingering Mike memorabilia. Even more Mingering Mike recordings are available for the listening at the Vanguard Squad.

London theatre : from the Globe to the National / James Roose-Evans.
Oxford : Phaidon, 1977.
[MCL call number: 792.09421 R781L; one copy, no holds]

It is difficult to imagine a city that is more about the theater than London.  At least for those of us steeped in the Western tradition (especially the English language one), there is no place that has a longer history of performance, playwriting, dramatic instruction, and also of censorship.  But there is so much written about the history of London theater; where do you begin?  Interested laypersons would do well to consult James Roose-Evans’ concise and readable history covering the four hundred years from the founding of The Theatre in 1576 to the opening of the new home of the National Theatre in 1976.

Roose-Evans takes readers step by step through the highlights of the art and business of London’s theater world, focusing on institutions, influential actors and managers, theater patrons, audiences, and the political context in which theaters, playwrights, audiences, and actors functioned.  Some of the stories that make up this narrative are particularly evocative of the oddities of the English character — for example, in 1809 John Philip Kemble opened the new Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (the old one had been destroyed in a fire).  In order to help pay the costs of the new building, prices were raised by about ten percent.  On opening night and for more than two months every performance was disrupted by riotous audiences chanting, singing, talking back to the stage, and waving signs and banners demanding a return of the old prices.  After each evening’s performance was finished, rioters would wend their way through the streets to Kemble’s house, where they whooped it up into the wee hours.  Kemble finally relented and lowered prices, and business returned to normal. 

London Theatre contains many such colorful stories, but it will also give readers a good grounding for the scope of the complex history of public performance and the theater in this most theatrical of cities.  The text is followed by a useful biography and an almost completely useless index (if you’re looking for a particular topic, start with the table of contents instead; it is reasonably descriptive and helpful).

African traditional architecture : an historical and geographical perspective / Susan Denyer ; line drawings by Susan Denyer ; maps by Peter McClure.
New York : Africana Pub. Co., 1978.
[MCL call number: 720.967 D417a 1978: one copy, no holds]

If you ask a person in the United States what a traditional African building looks like, chances are you will get a cursory description of a generic small hut.  It might be round, with some sort of thatching on top, and perhaps there will be a goat nearby or a barely-clothed person leaning in the doorway.  Such a dim picture exposes an ignorance of the diversity of traditional structures in Africa (and of the cultures that might produce buildings).  This might be fine — you can’t expect everyone to have a detailed knowledge of the material folk traditions of all the peoples of the world — but it’s only fine if the person you’ve asked actually understands that their vague description is vague.  That is, the bigger problem is that people often don’t know how little they know.

Fortunately, finding out how little you know about African vernacular architecture is easy when you have access to a book offering an accessible survey of the subject.  Thank goodness for libraries, right?  African Traditional Architecture contains a structured discussion of traditional sub-Saharan African buildings, with sections devoted to rural settlements, cities and towns, sacred and ceremonial buildings, defense, the building process, decoration, house forms, and the impact modernization has had on traditional structures.  The book is liberally illustrated with black and white photographs, maps, diagrams, and drawings, and the main contents are followed by a rather scholarly bibliography and an index.

Asmara : Africa’s secret modernist city / Edward Denison, Guang Yu Ren, Naigzy Gebremedhin.
London : Merrell, 2003.
[MCL call number: 720.9635 D396a 2003: two copies, no holds]

Asmara is the capitol of Eritrea, which is a little country on the African side of the Red Sea.  Between the 1890s and the 1940s, Eritrea was part of Italy’s colonial empire, and during that time the city of Asmara was built as a colonial capitol.  It is a smallish and very young city, in a much-ignored nation.  Even though Asmara could hardly be provincial (it is after all, the seat of government!), it seems likely that any cosmopolitan glory it might achieve is likely to forever remain unnoticed by most of the world.

However, since Asmara is a nearly new city, built in the twentieth century by Italian colonists who favored the Modernist tradition, it is a remarkable paradise of futuristic stylishness.  Because Asmara had to be built quickly, experiments with architectural design and ornament were allowed that would have never found favor in stodgy old Europe; and because new buildings were built on clear ground, architects and city planners did not have to work around any pesky existing infrastructure.  Everything was sparkly and new (at least in the wealthy, Italianized parts of town), and stylistic innovation was well-tolerated.

Asmara : Africa’s Secret Modernist City celebrates this Italian-built metropolis, with its clean modern lines, creative use of simple ornament, and stylish integration with the landscape.  Buildings of this tradition, but erected after the Italians lost power (from 1941 to 1991 Eritrea was controlled by Ethiopia, and saw decades of civil war) are also examined.  Unfortunately, the book’s focus doesn’t allow for a very thorough discussion of the “native quarter,” where most ethnic Eritreans lived during the Italian colonial era.  Neither is there much information about how the building of the (originally) Italian city affected Eritreans, or what the usage patterns of the different parts of the city are now. 

It is entirely reasonable for the authors to have limited their scope in this way — it is not their responsibility, after all, to provide a comprehensive history of the city and its culture — but since Asmara has not been written about as much as many other capitols, it is hard to know if readers could easily find this kind of depth elsewhere.  In any case, if you are interested in the cultural history of Asmara and how architecture has impacted life there, you may not find this book very satisfying.

Then again, if you want to see how Modernist architecture as practiced by Italian colonists melded with Eritrean culture and landscape to form the physical backbone of the nation’s principal city — especially if you want to see specific examples of buildings, their interiors, and their neighborhoods, the book may well delight you.

Asmara : Africa’s Secret Modernist City includes a terse introduction to Eritrean political history, and the history of the development of the city of Asmara from the 1890s to the present, focusing on architecture and civic planning.  This introductory section is followed by forty pages of portraits of buildings, arranged chronologically from 1889 to 1991.  The entire book is full of gorgeous photographs, with liberal use of maps, site plans, and architectural drawings to explain design concepts.  A chronology of Eritrean history, a bibliography, and an index follow the main text.

Cornerstones of community : buildings of Portland’s African American history.
Portland, Or. : Bosco-Milligan Foundation, 1995.
[MCL call number: 720.9795 C815; eight copies, no holds; four copies reference only at Central and North Portland Libraries]

Portland is one of the whitest cities in the United States, and its whiteness is a significant feature of its history.  Perhaps because Portlanders of color have always been so outnumbered by their white neighbors, over the years the city has also been very clearly segregated, with broad expanses of the city more or less off-limits to anyone but white folks.  Segregation here has taken different forms at different times, neighborhoods have changed greatly in the city’s 150 year history, and communities are fragile even in their vibrancy — so we don’t always see evidence of the past in streets, houses, and neighborhoods. 

Cornerstones of Community is an attempt to make some of the history of the buildings and neighborhoods of Portland’s African American community more accessible.   It is really more a work of social history than it is of architectural history — buildings and neighborhoods are presented as the context in which history happened, rather than examined as material artifacts in their own right.  The book’s text provides a history of black people in Portland — migration to Portland at different periods, state and local laws restricting black people’s lives, social and religious life, jobs and work opportunities, and political activism — all in light of how they affected home ownership, rental housing, business ownership, and community centers like churches, social clubs, and political organizations.  This history is presented chronologically, and each section is followed with maps showing African American population centers during the period discussed.

The book is appended with a series of maps showing locations of houses, businesses, and community organizations at different periods in Portland’s history — together with a master list of individuals, institutions, and businesses keyed to the maps.  This is perhaps the richest resource Cornerstones of Community offers, but sadly the appendix’s information design sharply limits its usefulness — looking for a person or business is easy, but there is no straightforward way to use the maps to get information about who lived or did business on a particular street at a particular time.  So, the appendix is invaluable if you want to find out some of the many places Dr. DeNorval Unthank and his wife Thelma lived in the many years they fought for fair housing practices, but not so great if you would like to know who the other African Americans noted as living along SE Tibbetts Avenue were. 

However, there is no getting around the fact that no other book — probably no other resource of any kind — tells this particular history.  And it is vital to anyone who wants to understand the history of our city to learn the story of where African American Portlanders have lived and worked, where they have worshiped and where they have spent their leisure hours, and how these places fit into the fabric of the city as a whole.  

Greetings from Oregon / by Gideon Bosker and Jonathan Nicholas.
Portland, OR : Graphic Arts Center Pub. Co., c1987.
[741.683 B743g; three copies, one hold]

Picture postcards have been ubiquitous for a long time, but before color film was widely available to amateur photographers they must have held a special appeal. If you went to an exotic foreign locale (like, say, Newport, Oregon) you could send home postcards showing beautiful, realistic images of the highlights of your trip to family and friends. Or, you could buy postcards for yourself and use them to indulge in nostalgic memories of your journey later. Think of how thrilling this would be if no one had yet heard of modern wonders like mobile telephones with a built-in cameras!

Greetings from Oregon reproduces hundreds of postcards of the Beaver State. Some are the classic location postcard, the ones with the word “OREGON” or “PORTLAND” or whatever spelled out in letter-shaped pictures of photogenic spots. Others are photographs of prosaic rural vistas, graceful urban environments, important buildings, natural wonders, and scenes depicting practical aspects of the local economy. Most are in full color — beautiful, slightly unrealistic hand-tinted full color — and all are reproduced at about their original size.

After a stirringly patriotic (in the provincial, loyal-to-one’s state sense) and completely unnecessary introduction from then-governor Neil Goldschmidt, the pictorial contents of Greetings from Oregon are arranged geographically and topically, with sections devoted to the Columbia River, the mountains, Eastern Oregon, Portland, the coast, rural Oregon, the timber industry, the towns of the Willamette Valley, and, last but definitely not least, postcards immortalizing three of our state’s major celebratory events — the Lewis & Clark Exposition of 1905, the Pendleton Round-Up, and the Portland Rose Festival.

Greetings from Oregon may be one of the best ways to look at some of Oregon’s lost treasures — Celio Falls (page 12), a passenger train departing Seaside for Portland (page 77), the old State Capitol (page 95), a busy Main Street in Pendleton with no cars in sight (page 31), a single old-growth fir cut to fit four rail cars (page 88), or the old Portland harbor (page 43), not to mention the round bed at the Mallory Hotel (page 59)!

The book would be better if the captions explained the approximate date of each postcard, and (I know I’m always saying this. . .) if it had an index. But, I’m not complaining. Greetings from Oregon shows us at our air-brushed and hand-tinted best, and we ought to be proud of how damned fine we looked.

[thanks, Geoff]

Sock monkeys : (200 out of 1,863) / Arne Svenson + Ron Warren.
New York : Ideal World Books, c2002.
[MCL call number: 745.5924 S968s 2002; two copies, no holds]

Ron Warren’s collection of sock monkeys began with the simple desire to show how unique and special each individual sock monkey is. No monkey is like another. By the time a friend introduced him to photographer Arne Svenson, Warren had accumulated more than a thousand monkeys, and he hasn’t stopped yet. Sock Monkeys is the record of Svenson’s quest to individually photograph each and every one of Warren’s sock monkeys in classic studio portraiture manner.

You might think that two hundred sock monkey portraits would be dull and repetitive, but Warren’s collection is astonishingly diverse, and Svenson takes care to capture the individual expressiveness of each sock monkey. Some monkeys are straight-up classic; their only ornamentation in the style of their ear construction, the shape of their eyes, or the arrangement of the tuft at the top of their precious heads. Others are wearing elaborate outfits denoting their profession, personal interests, or sense of style. The photographs are punctuated with stories inspired by some of the sock monkeys – written by Neil Gaiman, Penn Jillette, Jonathan Safran Foer, Isaac Mizrahi, and others.

Sock Monkeys is a book you could find amusing with just a brief glance; but you may find yourself pouring over each photograph, considering the differences in personality between monkeys with eyelashes and those with none, monkeys with buttons sewn down their fronts and monkeys with bow ties, monkeys with caps and those with veils, and between monkeys who hold their heads up high and those who demurely nod at the camera.

Space, style, and structure : building in Northwest America / Thomas Vaughan, editor ; Virginia Guest Ferriday, associate editor.
Portland, Or. : Oregon Historical Society, 1974.
[MCL call number: 720.979 V369s (two volumes); seven copies, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

If you want to know about the buildings in our region, what they are like, where they came from, who has used them, and who made them, Space, Style, and Structure is a good place to start.  Although it purports to be a comprehensive history of architecture in the entire Pacific Northwest, its focus is more on Oregon than our neighbor states and provinces, and the parts on Oregon deal more with Portland and the towns of the Willamette Valley than the rest of the state.  However, the book is still valuable as a jumping-off point for anyone seeking an education in the regional history of buildings and architecture. 

Space, Style, and Structure is presented chronologically, in sections devoted to “Origins” (indigenous peoples’ architecture before the arrival of white people, and structures built by the first settler-traders and missionaries), “Pioneer Days,” “Railroad Era,” “Motor Age,” and “Freeway Forms.”  Each section begins with an essay on the regional setting during the period under discussion, followed by essays on development in selected cities and towns, and several brief chapters on specific buildings, gardens, building styles, architectural functions, and other related topics. 

Each chapter has a different author, but the narrative flow and the style of writing is fairly regular throughout.  I would guess that this is due to the vigilance of the editors, and it is an asset to the book.  Still, the writing style can be somewhat florid at times.  Vaughn’s introduction, in particular, suffers from overwriting.  For example, here he characterizes human prehistory:

“The times were almost beyond our conception — eons and then millennia ago — when our hunting ancestors huddled together in the darkness.  Ravening beasts of horrendous description were masters of the night, carrying off their meal from the weakest and the luckless.  The age is barely recorded when men fought beasts not only for food, but over food and to decide who was going to occupy some dry cave or overhang.

“After all, from immemorial time reason tells us that when they could get them our ancestors craved shelter and protection, which meant something over their heads for security such as the vaulted gallery of a cave and eventually the first mud walls, skins and willows or a crude rooftree.  Architecture is first and foremost linked to one of the necessities of life — a shelter.” (page xiv)

The book suffers somewhat from its massive size — it is more than seven hundred large pages in two extremely heavy volumes — and from the fact that although each volume has a separate table of contents which treats only the material in that volume, there is one index for both volumes printed only at the end of volume two.  To make matters worse, the index is only passably useful.  However, as much as I can argue about the details, there is still no getting around the fact that Space, Style, and Structure stands alone as the only book to attempt to explain the complex history of architecture across the Pacific Northwest.  The stories that are told here are told clearly, they are well illustrated, and even more importantly, they are augmented with careful notes and bibliographies to aid future research.

Last of the handmade buildings : glazed terra cotta in downtown Portland / Virginia Guest Ferriday.
Portland, Or. : Mark Pub. Co., 1984.
[MCL call number: 725.097954 F389L; four copies, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

If you stood on the east bank of the Willamette River in the 1890s and looked across at downtown Portland, you would have seen riverside warehouses backed by a dark brick and stone business district, with few buildings higher than eight or so stories.  The same vantage point forty years later offered a view of a modernized city center with tall steel framed buildings, many of them faced in pale, glazed terra cotta. 

Why terra cotta?  When you build a building that is very tall, you have to find a way to keep it from falling down.  Around the turn of the century, steel frame technology allowed for a sincere revolution the design of large buildings — with light but sturdy steel frames to hold everything up, you could build extremely high without having to build walls nearly as thick as you would if you were trying to build out of stone.  But unlike buildings built of stone and brick, steel framed buildings do not have facing material and frame in one package — you have to cover up the steel with something.  Terra cotta is a nice solution because it is fireproof, much more lightweight than stone or brick, it can be formed into decorative and useful shapes easily, and it can be glazed in many colors. 

Ferriday’s thoughtful study of downtown Portland’s terra cotta buildings chronicles the period of their construction and profiles 40 surviving buildings.  She begins with a short but careful history of the development of downtown Portland and the general and local factors that allowed glazed terra cotta buildings to become, for a short period, a dominant architectural form.  Next are chapters on the technical concerns of terra cotta manufacture and application, terra cotta as an ornamental medium, and preservation of terra cotta building components.

Finally, Ferriday inventories 40 of downtown Portland’s glazed terra cotta buildings — from the Wells Fargo Building on SW 6th and Oak (built in 1907) to Charles F. Berg’s glorious department store on SW Broadway between Morrison and Alder (built in 1930), each building is described in detail, including the circumstances of its construction and information about its architect, original owners, initial use, decorative and architectural elements, and historical context.  A contemporary photograph or architect’s drawing illustrates each entry, and Ferriday provides a detailed list of sources for each building — this is the part that makes my librarian heart sing, really, because I know it must have taken hundreds of hours of research to build these little bibliographies of city records, professional and newspaper articles, pamphlets, company archives, and interviews. 

Although Last of the Handmade Buildings is clearly written and easy to read, it is so well illustrated (a useful picture, I think, on just about every page) that even those who do not trouble to read the text should find the book educational and interesting.

 * * *

In addition to her work on this book and as associate editor of the regional architectural history Space Style, and Structure : Building in Northwest America (reviewed above), Ferriday is dear to the hearts of local librarians and researchers for another project: she was the coordinator of a city-initiated inventory of historic properties that was completed in the early 1908s.  The inventory was published in binder form, and provides basic historical information about thousands of glamorous and everyday buildings in every Portland neighborhood, from Sellwood to St. Johns and Montavilla to Portland Heights:

Historic resource inventory, City of Portland, Oregon : identified properties.
Portland, Or. : Bureau of Planning, 1984.
[MCL call number: O- 720.9795 H675i; one copy reference only at Central Library]

 * * *

Those of you who become fascinated by terra cotta buildings should be interested to know that there are certainly other books about them.  Seattle’s terra cotta buildings are tersely inventoried in Impressions of Imagination : Terra-Cotta Seattle (Seattle, Wash. : Allied Arts of Seattle, Inc., 1986), which also includes ten essays on various aspects of terra cotta architecture, a glossary, and a walking map. 

New York City’s terra cotta buildings are lovingly described in Terra-Cotta Skyline : New York’s Architectural Ornament (by Susan Tunick, New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), which includes some really lovely full-color modern photographs of New York City’s rather lurid polychrome terra cotta decoration as well as a helpful history of the terra cotta industry in New York and across the country.

No doubt there are books about terra cotta buildings in other cities as well.

Little house on a small planet : simple homes, cozy retreats, and energy efficient possibilities / by Shay Salomon ; photographs by Nigel Valdez.
Guilford, Conn. : Lyons Press, c2006.
[MCL call number: 728.37 S174L 2006; nine copies, three holds]

There are many books about how to build an “eco-friendly” house, or remodel an existing house to be more “green.”  The library where I work has scores of titles on building houses from straw bales or out of cob, installing green roofs, naturescaping your urban garden, installing solar power, and choosing building materials that are less toxic than the standard, or that have been more or less sustainably manufactured.  The library also has hundreds of books showing floor plans for dream houses and giving advice about how to decorate, landscape, organize, and live happily in your apartment or house. 

But even the books that focus on building small, living in a limited space, or reducing how decorating, remodeling, or landscaping negatively impacts the environment; even these are practically throwing a party for readers who want to change something substantial about their home.  It’s hard to find a book that recommends that you leave your home as it is, a book that advocates for the position that the most eco-friendly thing you can do to your house may well be to  decide not to remodel or renovate it.  Little House on a Small Planet, however, is such a book.

Little House uses profiles of dozens of people and families and their small houses to illustrate a series of twelve suggestions for reducing how much impact an individual dwelling has on the environmental life of our planet.  Each profile is accompanied by information about the house and its inhabitants, its size, energy costs, and location.  Most are accompanied by photographs and floor plan drawings.

The small houses profiled really are small — some provide as little as about 100 square feet per occupant (for those of you who aren’t familiar with what this means, imagine a medium-sized apartment kitchen) — but the creative use of space, especially storage space and common space, makes them feel roomy to their occupants.  Many of the people profiled cite their small living space as a catalyst for their personal happiness — small spaces encouraged them to more actively live with their housemates, and to share their space more consciously.  At the same time, living right on top of family members caused some folks to rethink what privacy means and find ways to celebrate everyone’s right to be alone sometimes.  People report that a small house makes them less materialistic — their limited space requires them to consider new possessions carefully. And many small house dwellers reflect on the joy of neighborhood community space.

Little House doesn’t really have a smooth narrative flow — it reads a little bit like the report of a survey.  I found it suited me best to leaf through the book, stopping to read where photographs or floor plans caught my eye, or when I was interested in the particular question being discussed — the consequences of 30 year mortgages, building or redefining space for and with teenagers, encouraging common space in neighborhoods, working within the constraints of building codes.  The book’s index is reasonably good, and the endnotes are helpful, but I wished for more ways to get at the information.  A index of houses and people profiled, for example, would have been nice.  However, Little House has much to recommend it: as leisure reading for people who are interested in the composition of residential space and the history of dwellings; as practical reading for anyone who wants to build a house, remodel one, or reconcile themselves to living in one; and as a resource for anyone researching small houses or environmentally conscious building and remodeling.

Humble masterpieces : everyday marvels of design / Paola Antonelli ; photographs by Francesco Mosto.
New York : ReganBooks, c2005.
[MCL call number: 745.209 A634h 2005; six copies, no holds]

If you would be interested to know who invented the metal cap that graces bottles of beer the world over, if you have wondered why marbles are called that even though they’re made of glass, or if you would like to learn more about the various inventors responsible for the incandescent light bulb, Humble Masterpieces may be just the book you need. Each of the one hundred entries displays an artistic photograph of the design marvel on the left-hand page, with information about its inventor, the date of its invention, and a brief, chatty essay on the right-hand page.  It’s nice to leaf through — you’ll certianly pick up a few facts you can bring out at your next cocktail party — but each essay is so neccesarily short that readers seeking a complex understanding may be left feeling unfilfilled. 

The marvelous objects seem to be arranged in no particular order, and short of flipping through the pages, the only way to find a particular one is to consult the chronological index at the back of the book.  This lack of access points (as we call them in the library trade) is frustrating, but since the book is so breezy, it’s not a serious complaint.  After all, if you absolutely needed a complete and thorough examination of all the gritty details about the design and invention of the post-it note, dominoes, the spark plug, or stainless steel soap, you would be reading some other book.  This one is really just for fun.

[thanks, Karen]