Minature makers (5/5)

 

I saw this book mentioned a few times in The architectural models of Theodore Conrad (ISBN 978-1350152847) and I was intrigued enough to find a copy. It was originally published in 1968 but it has been completely revised for the 1978 edition. This is sort of academic now because software available to the architectural profession has made model building almost redundant but clients of large commercial estates probably still need to see, for prestige reasons, their potential property in miniature.

Jank's book is essentially visual with comprehensive deep captions explaining the images. Each spread has German text on the left-hand page and English on the opposite page. The emphasis is really on large projects like housing estates, business parks, or airports, rather than individual houses or single commercial properties. The photos are mostly bird's eye views of the models.

The book is probably more of a curio for architectural model makers.

Esther's bus trip (5/5)

Esther Bubley wasn't as well known as other photographers who worked for Roy Stryker at the Office of War Information, people like Arthur Rothstein or Gordon Parks but Stryker was impressed with her work and while she was only twenty-two he sent her on a six-week assignment to cover wartime bus travel.

This fascinating book reveals Bubley's impressive photojournalism style. The three main chapters ('At the depot', 'Along the way' and 'Behind the scenes') reveal with over 140 photos how Greyhound carried the public in the summer of 1943 across the South and the Mid-West. Her photos clearly show that bus travel involved a lot of waiting around in various Greyhound bus stations because of speed limits, gas and tire rationing. 'Along the way' has Bubley on the bus photographing the passengers as they traveled across the Mid-West and the various stops at Greyhound Post Houses and small towns. The last selection of photos captures the folk who kept the company running, the drivers who were frequently away from home, mechanics working on engines, women cleaning bus interiors and others loading luggage or checking paperwork.

All the photos reproduce Bubley's original captions and the author adds a lot of background material that makes the photos even more interesting. As almost every photo has people in it it's worth looking at the clothing that the public wore in 1943.

Roy Stryker left the OWI to work for Standard Oil, Bubley went with him and in 1947 she repeated the original Greyhound bus journey assignment by traveling through New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. 

 

Have a bite of your history (5/5)

A fascinating book, revealing, in 364 pages, the extraordinary push westward by pioneers who traveled mile after mile across the plains, then mountains and eventually reached the Pacific. The story is spelled out with hundreds of images, either photos, drawings, paintings, maps and several spread-wide color graphics of, for example, a cut-away of a steamboat, a covered wagon, panning for gold, or a sodbuster's family home.

A clever editorial feature of the book is that each spread covers an individual subject rather than a continuous narrative throughout the book. The reader can dip into these pages with a mixture of bite-size text mixed together with relevant images (which all have captions).

To give you an idea of how comprehensive the book is the eight pages of the Index have around 2240 entries.