The way we were

 

Selling boxes of loose postcards, mostly a hundred, is a minor publishing genre and I find it surprising that a box of mid-century ones from the Tichnor Brothers (America's second biggest printer/publisher after Teich) haven't arrived yet. Though the hundred and thirty in this book reveal what could have been seen in Ohio during past decades it should interest anyone who finds a bit of pop culture and Americana interesting.

The book's four postcard chapters (City scenes, On the road, Landmarks and Large letter) cover it all with their rather flamboyant color and heavy retouching of the original photos. There's a spread of aerial cards of Akron, Kent and Hamilton and they look quite fascinating. Building big hotels in cities must have been in vogue during the twenties to the forties of the last century, one spread has cards from the Waldorf and Secor in Toledo, the Harding in Marion and Hotel Fort Hays in Columbus and I assume these cards, like many of motels in the On the road chapter were given away free as a form of advertising. The Landmarks chapter has thirty-six cards of bridges, rivers, stadiums, colleges and plenty of historic building around Ohio.

A nice idea in the book is that all the cards are life size and fortunately none are angled or overlap each other. Another plus are the informative captions about what happened to many of the buildings throughout the book, especially hotels that were changed into apartments. Most of the old style motels and commercial buildings along the highways were demolished and this is why the book is quite fascinating in revealing the way we were.

A worthwhile backward look

I reviewed the original book when it first came out in 2003:
A handsome selection of Posy Simmonds cartoons that mostly appeared in the weekly book review supplement of The Guardian. They all relate to literature and especially publishing, either as strips or whole page cartoons. My favorites are the strips for Ask Doctor Derek, where a handsome young MD solves medical (literary) problems like a bout of plagiarism, the incredibly contagious writers cliché or dreadful critics mauling syndrome. Simmonds drawing style is typically British, slightly soft and with a caricature edge as opposed to the slick graphic style of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury for example.

This revised edition is a bit larger than the original and has more material, which I assume is the thirteen pages after a blank page near the back of the book. This includes a six page all color strip (though one page oddly is in mono). Posy has a wicked sense of humour, especially when she is exposing the phonies of the English publishing establishment. A bull's-eye every time and great fun, too.



　
 

Walker Evans and his working prints (part one)

This book (and book two) take a fresh approach to his photos by showing them in the context of the times, very much like the original intention of the FSA to reveal rural poverty to the rest of America via newspapers and magazines. The book's 140 photos by Evans reveal how he chose his subjects and the author has researched some interesting background material about the locations (there are several period maps to give an indication of where Evans was standing) and what the photos reveal about the Depression years and how people lived in those hard times.

The contents in this first book has a short chapter on the cameras Evans used then chapters on Places, Signs and People. Signs has plenty of photos showing posters, shop fronts, hand-written store signs and lettering seen in the environment that made a staple shot for all the FSA photographers. Places is a visual round-up of the States Evans visited for FSA assignments and People captures many faces and individuals including street scenes, a prison crew working in the countryside and eight pages covering the Mississippi floods of 1937.

I think it's worth saying that book one and two are not conventional photobooks of Evans work with one photo a page printed on art paper, here the author has produced something different by using these remarkable documentary pictures and historical research to present a fresh view of the Depression years.