Historic Books

Before committing a couple of days to museum hopping while in Boston, a word to the wise: this book is a must for understanding the scope of the collection of Amercian Decorative Arts - everything that makes the MFA one of the best museums in America. But more important than that, this is a compendium of examples of some of the finest art. The reproductions are excellent with all of the data needed to give a brisk brush up on not only the work illustrated but the timeframe incidentals that make the MFA such a user friendly museum. Whether for the personal library or for the perfect gift for art lovers, this guide (MFA Highlights series ) is highly recommended.

Co-written by Gerald W.R. Ward, Nonie Gadsded, and Kelly L'Ecuyer, American Decorative Arts features over 100 carefully selected masterpieces of furniture, silver, glass, ceramics, base metals, basketry and sculpture from one of the world's preeminent collections; The Museum of Fine Arts. With an intricate layout, American Decorative Arts is presented in an encyclopedic, with features inclusive of significant pieces from a wide geographic area and all time periods. Strongly recommended for appreciators of the high-arts, as well as academic and public library reference collections.

If you want to acquire a collection of photographs tracing the entire history of American steam locomotive development, this is the book. It is limited to builders' portraits, and has no photos of locomotives "in action". The book is chronologically organized, and photos are chosen to illustrate the different types of engines produced, with many pictures of rare and one-of-a-kind designs, like the 2-8-8-8-4T. Some engines built for foreign railroads are included, as are elevated-railway locomotives. A great picture book.

In the early development of locomotives, few photographs exist prior to the 1860s. Ravages of time and the fragile nature of glass negatives eliminated many photographs and some only exist today as third generation copy negatives, devoid of most details. However, through the collection of Mr. William A. Rogers' builder photographs, we can witness the details of the original locomotives as they rolled of the production line. Historically, builder photographs are important because the photos documents the locomotive "as built" by the locomotive manufacturer. Because almost all locomotives were altered during their lifetimes with the addition of equipment or the repair of equipment with parts from other locomotives, these builder photos represent a snapshot of the original configuration of the manufacturer.

The Rogers collection illustrated in "American Locomotives" are "builder portraits." Customarily, one engine from an order was selected as the "official portrait" and was usually a side view or a partial view of the front showing the driving rods in a lowered position and no escaping stream or smoke. According to the author, almost all official portraits were taken in low light or on cloudy days. "American Locomotives" presents both old and rare locomotive builder portraits from the Rogers collection as well as later versions of locomotives that ran in the 1940s and 1950s. The author has managed to research the locomotives illustrated in the book and add a short note describing each locomotive. The one short coming of this book is that the reader is often left begging for additional information about particular locomotives, but that is what the reference section of libraries are for. Overall, the book "American Locomotives" is an outstanding addition to any train buff's collection.

Polly Brown and Jane Bernard are the Thelma and Louise of Documentary photography, shooting their way down the Mother Road with eyes and hearts wide open. Steinbeck, Kerouac, Mick Jagger, and Elvis would all love this book, and so do I.

Jane Bernard and Polly Brown are accomplished, widely-published Santa Fe photographers who spent three years on American's most legendary trail. American Route 66: Home on the Road (172 p., Museum of New Mexico Press, 2003, $45) "winds from Chicago to L.A." These superb color and black-and-white photographs merge with their subjects mini-oral histories and the photographers' journal entries.

We discover that an elongated Lake Woebegone populated by people such as Charles and Gazelle Stewart, who have surrounded their petrified wood store with towering folk-artsy dinosaurs designed to make kids demand to stop the car. Gazelle recalls how Jerry Seinfeld came in one day with his bodyguard, "a little bitty man...with such a huge gun he could hardly keep his pants up." Seinfeld wanted a $3,000 meteorite, but the power was down, so they couldn't run his credit card. They trusted him anyway.

"We'd make more money," Charles says, "if I'd stop making so many dinosaurs."

American Ruins is far more than it appears. On the surface, it is a very well designed and exquisitely photographed essay on the vanishing farmsteads of the northern plains states in the USA. That's like saying the Mona Lisa is a woman.

On the next plane, the photographs-panoramics mainly, in black-and-white on infrared film-are beyond photography. They are a spiritual experience on paper that comes as close to the experience of truth as can be done without becoming it yourself. They are haunting, wistful, emotional evocations of the pain of time and loss, the invisible presence of people in what the picture does not, cannot, show, in the way that only black-and-white can push you out of "that" into "thisness." As the foreword puts it: "... as if the camera has recorded something going on inside your head and projected it onto a wall." Small wonder many feel black-and-white is the most difficult image recorder to work with, and also to many the most sublime when done well.

Sublime Mr. MacKenzie is. This is one of the most remarkably photographed books to come off the presses in a long time. Not just well done, but literally beyond compare; the sole occupant of its category. The photographs are closer to poetry without a pen than to the interaction between film and lens. Songs without words in an A-4 landscape book. The only thing to match them is the writing excerpts that "captions" them. (The captions in the conventional sense are Notes at the end of the book.) Mr. MacKenzie chose the excerpts himself, and he certainly did his homework well. Wallace Stegner is here, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Henry Miller, Frank Lloyd right, and two writers who would probably be surprised to find their sentences thrust alongside the eloquence of this book. But here they are, and no the less eloquent:

"When family love is displaced onto land, every change that happens there has meaning: the calibre of the light and the texture of the clouds in a day, the big changes of the seasons, most of all the slow transformation of the infrastructure of the place itself as the decades pass. When the deflection of love is also a deflection of pain, the gradual decomposition of such a place can be excruciating, a kind of lifelong torture, and yet, at the same time, a hypnotic, unfolding story. As the place declines, layers of meaning are revealed."

=Suzannah Lessard, "The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family"

To which Annette Atkins adds, in "Harvest of Grief: Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance* in Minnesota, 1872-78":

"Minnesota lost settlers during the dark days of the 1870s . . . but thousands remained. Some could afford to stay; some could not afford to leave. Debts held some. Others wanted to hold on to their investments of time and energy. Some held different attachments; as one man explained: `I have lost my all here, & somehow I believe that if I find it again, it will be in the immediate neighborhood where I lost it . . . I have a child buried on my claim & my ties are stronger & more binding on that account.'"

In between is writing that calls our attention to what the unrushed eye can see: ". . . leaning barns and windowless houses, jutting up like wreckage in oceans of furrowed wheat and sorghum, architecture that looks more like a visible absence of something, like a missing tooth, than it looks like a presence of sun-curled clapboard and tatters of tar paper. It looks like ruins . . . of dreams that didn't work out."

Then he goes beyond all that, to the lives unseen in these pictures, flesh long gone but souls still there, a kind of spirit of determination to match this spirit of place: ". . . boredom, bad luck, debt, despair; about the blizzard that leaves you burning your inside walls to stay alive because if you go outside for firewood you'll vanish; about a summer erupting with wheat until the grasshoppers darken the sky and eat everything-wheat, vegetable garden, even the leaves on the trees; about a husband who tells his wife he'll be right back after he rides out to round up two cows-she watches him ride around the cows and keep going and he never comes back."

Beauty of a special kind, these-of death, decay, the falling to ruin-but life of a kind all the more: eonic, seasonless as a century, brutal cold and brutal heat, wind vying only with grass for endlessness, and to the human who endures these and thus surpasses the self, transfiguration. Into this, the Great Plains, families came, filled with grit and ambition and not a few starry-eyed dreams. They are still here, here in these pictures. Look around the corners and there they are, in the boards of the barn they nailed, among the leaves in the trees they planted. With all that's in this book, we can see what we never would have before, the eyes of dreams become the last remains of a rainbow.

That said, this is what books used to be in the highest sense of the craft. And still are, if only we seek out and buy the work of presses like the Afton Historical Society.

This is the book for people who didn't think that they liked landscape photography. MacKenzie takes you through a voyage to the abandoned worlds of farms, schools and other building in the middle of the nowhere lands of midwestern America. Here we find that ruined farmhouse, strangely sculpted by the winds and snow of many winters, but not depicted as some quaint, picturesque image, but as a stark vision in long Puritan panoramic views that work to make the landscapes appear as through they are suspended in time, a strange reminder of once active places, now abandoned and ruined, but notheless spectacular in their setting. This is the photographer that will make you throw away your Nan Goldins and your Cindy Shermans and discover what is it that makes photography the newest vibrant member of the visual fine arts.

American theatres are marvels of design and content and here to celebrate their history is AMERICAN THEATRES, a top pick for any serious college-level holding strong in film and stage history. The book profiles some forty of the finest theatres in operation around the country, covering a range of structures and styles and blending original photos by David Naylor - many published here for the first time - to contrast histories of different venues, from playhouses and opera houses to concert halls. The state-by-state listing of over 200 surviving 19th century theatres assures any serious buff will easily locate venues.

Well-written. Over 300 photos of historic American theaters located in all but six US states (with 18 pages in color). Buildings featured include town hall theaters, Western boom-town opera houses, library theaters, Chautauqua halls, and Grand Opera Houses. Readers will be surprised by the variety and beauty of many theaters in remote areas.

Wow, can you imagine traveling to so many cultures and time periods... and not leave your living room. It's a real eye-opener, in more ways than one. I am quite surprised how the synagogue -the "original" place of monotheistic worship- can have so many faces: beautiful, even exquisite, faces. Anyone interested in architecture or religious expression will enjoy this book immensely. [p.s. My favorite shot? pgs 120-121]

This book was given to me as an anniversary gift by my wife. I do not think I have ever had a better one.
In his introduction Neil Folberg talks about his having tried to photograph the synagogues presented in this album as he himself has 'seen ' them. This thought made a great deal of sense to me when I looked and compared some of the photos here with my memories of the same synagogues. I had seen the Altneushuel in Prague in a depth of darkness and sadness , a grief which obscured completely its other side- the holy light and transforming beauty Folberg's photographs reveal in it.
There are so many treasures in this work. I knew nothing for instance about Uzbekhi family-synagogues. Their intimacy and skill in decoration moved me. Folberg traveled through many different parts of the world, to reach some very well- known and some little - known and little- visited synagogues. He and his assistant Max Richardson brought with them an enormous amount of lighting equipment. Folger's description of how they might labor for days to achieve one perfect picture , deepened my appreciation for their enterprise.
Folberg knows the world of the synagogue well, and his introductions before each major area of the world's synagogues visited add a great deal to the book. The afterword by Yom Tov Assis teaches a much about the development of the synagogue over time.
I have always had a special love for synagogues.
I was raised in a small but for me, especially beautiful synagogue, Shaarah Tefillah in Troy, New York. I kept wishing that Folberg had somehow years before gotten to it, and photographed before its unfortunate demolition.
Part of the poignance of this work is that Folberg does arrive at many synagogues which no longer have congregations, or which only a few people left. There is a certain sense of 'memorialization' then in his photographing them , though he does not stress this motif.
His stress is on the synagogues themselves as they appear now. Here I think it is important to emphasize one central element of his work. One can think of neglected synagogues in the disapora, as places of gloom, darkness, neglect,great physical poverty. After all most of the synagogues are much smaller places of worship than the churches or mosques of the area they are in. But Folberg so lights the synagogues that they become somehow sparklingly - up- to date , beautifully preserved.
Folberg's descriptions of his work and the synagogues are poetic and impressive. He provides a kind of travelogue of the Jewish world in his describing each of the places he comes to, and the unique character of its synagogues.
All synagogues by the way share the feature of being pointed towards Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount.
This book is inspiring and beautiful. I believe it belongs in every Jewish home , and in the homes of all those who would see and understand , how holiness and beauty may be made one.

Andrea Zittel is a remarkable artist and this book is proof of it. It looks effortless, the way she explores her world and turns reality into art and art into reality. Her art combines the abstract with the concrete, the uniform with unique, the wise with the simple truth. It is not critical space, it is critical living (where a living is a space too).

This is a high quality print art book, is well edited, with the artist's career and thoughts organized into chapters, somewhat chronologically. Zittel is only in her late 30s and is super prolific so this book is really like an early mid life summary and not a true retrospective.

Zittel's lists of ideas are handy. When I am feeling down about the messiness, the lack of space, urban decay, and my relative poverty, I just need to look at one of her lists to get cheered up (e.g., matte surfaces hide dirt, how much space does one need, anyway?) She has such a sense of humor about stuff that most people get too serious about (today, everyone wants more space, more clothes, more variety.... Zittel makes you laugh and question, why? And to recognize that too much choice, too much stuff becomes oppressive).

I predict that Zittel will be as recognized one day as a Knoll, a Perriand, a Schindler-type epoch-maker, a messiah, a visionary for modernist design. Under the terms of our mass consumer culture, she cannot become really popular, but she has the right critical outsider attitude, and with such a happy, cheerful twist. I wish Target or some mass market producer would adopt some of her ideas and sell them to the masses (the bowl-in-the-table, the carpets made to look like furniture, the "uniform" outfit, the A-Z living unit, etc.).

Zittel has the vision to improve the average person's life through simple changes, and even allow people to spend less money for fewer, but better designed, "re-thought" products.

`The book is site reporting at its best. It is extremely well illustrated with numerous field excavation photographs, artifact plates, historical maps, and South's archaerological site plans, which rank among the most artistic and informative produced. This is an excellent site report and well worth the wait.'

Journal of Anthropological Research, 59 (2003)

`.. a major authority on method and theory in historical archaeology and an expert on the American Southeast, considers arhcaeological conservation, theory building, and historic site interpretation and restoration focusing on 1670-80 Charles Towne, South Carolina, and the Native American legacy that preceded European colonization. His well-documented compendium explicates "the process of historic site development for the education and entertainment of the visiting public", presenting a salient example of historic cultural resource management.'

Choice, 40:2 (October 2002)

This is certainly one of the most useful collections of essay discussing the problems facing contextual study of antiquity and the illicit trade in antiquities. Important topics explored include: looting in Iraq and the movement of objects from that region to western markets; the processes that occur within the trade and an analysis of dealer arguments that the trade is legitimate and unharmful and the clever circumnavigation of various laws; and finally, some that discuss the motivations for collecting and the need for cooperation between polarized factions (professionals/academics/archaeologists and collectors/dealers).

This volume gives a great overview of current issues relating to the antiquities trade and the threat that it poses to cultural heritage across the world. Many of the case studies are extremely recent, demonstrating the urgency of the problem, a must for anyone to read who cares about the world's finite heritage resource.

This book is NOT out of stock, as it has been reprinted in 1988 and remains avaliable from Whalesback Books. For orders, call 202/333-2182.

This is a reprint of a book originally published in the 1930s, which describes with great sophistication the architecture of the many 18th century homes that dot the Piscataqua River valley, primarily in Portsmouth. At the time it was written, many of these homes were still occupied by descendants of the original owners, whereas now they are owned by non-profit organizations and are open to the public. It is enormously rewarding to compare the black and white pictures in the book with the houses as they are today. It also contains an introductory essay that gives a superb explanation of the evolution of domestic architecture from America's earliest settlements through the 18th century. As the book explains, Portsmouth, along with Newburyport, Annapolis, and Charleston, are unique among historic American cities because they prospered in the 18th century only to decline thereafter, thereby allowing their wonderful examples of Georgian and Federal/Adam architecture to be preserved. By way of contrast, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia grew so rapidly in the 19th century that most of their examples of this type of home were lost to the wrecker's ball.