Wednesday, 19 November 2025

Tube benders delight 4/5





















The authors drove around Nevada, I assume mostly at night, to capture the neon signage that the state is famous for. A map opposite the Contents page shows that it wasn't just the obvious Las Vegas and Reno but lots of small towns with bars, motels, truck stops and other buildings that sported some wonderful vintage and new neon. 

Makers of these delights name themselves as tube benders and the YESCO Company (Young Electric Sign Company) rightly gets lots of mentions and a lot of old signs from their scrapyard formed the basis of the Neon Museum, Las Vegas (with more than 250 signs and best to visit after dark to enjoy the glow). Some signs are now really famous, like cowboy Vegas Vic with his moving left arm, built for $90,000 in 1951 by Thomas Young or his sidekick Vegas Vickie. Probably photographed thousands of times is the Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas Nevada, designed by Betty Willis and erected in 1959.

The book is an updated and expanded edition of the 1994 and 2011 titles with lots of color photos. I thought it unfortunate that many of these are smaller than necessary, with rather generous margins on many pages and oddly, the photo pages have no page numbers (making chunks of the back pages Index redundant).

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