Description
A. S. Barnes and Company, Published 1961. Hardcover, 187 pp.; 26 cm; First Edition (1961, with no statement of later printing); illustrated with over 300 black-and-white photographs.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Pale gray cloth boards, black lettering on spine, with mild surface and edge wear, a hint of soiling, and some color loss along the edges and at head and foot of spine. Binding tight. Mild toning to endpapers, heavier to front pastedown and free endpaper, where laid-in papers left soft rectangular offset marks. Otherwise unmarked. Pictorial dust jacket has several half-inch chips, tears, and creasing along the edges, with sepia panels rubbed through to the paper along the top and bottom edges and down the spine fold, fading to top edge and along spine, and toning with a few dark specks to rear panel. Not price clipped. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Over 300 photographs of American material culture that Wilson judged to be on its way out in 1961, arranged in four sections covering farms, homes, towns, and transportation. Each object gets a short explanatory note: the privy, the player piano, the pot-bellied stove, the butter churn, the hitching post, the livery stable, the whipping post, the interurban electric train. Wilson, a Northwestern-trained newspaperman who moved into public relations and then photography, took most of the pictures himself, working largely in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, with additional images from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the Great Northern Railway, and the Library of Congress. Contents: Introduction: Our Changing American Life; Our Changing Farms; Our Changing Homes; Our Changing Towns; Our Changing Transportation; Acknowledgments.