January 2011

by H. Thomas Steele. Jim Heimann. and Rod Dyer; Abbeville Press; 96 pages.

Matchbook covers are little posters and this lavish gallery of them displays their bright and forthright graphics to splendid advantage. Here are deco hotels rising in scintillant cubes of green and orange, streamlined locomotives pulling silver cars, ecstatic redcaps hurrying out to help, hula dancers, longhaul truckers, fighter planes, and endless restaurant interiors, all severely geometric, all inexplicably inviting. The introduction begins with the deadening information that “fire, along with air, water, and earth, was long regarded as one of our planet’s four basic elements” but soon picks up with the pioneering Henry C. Traute’s 1894 sale of ten million matchbooks with printed covers to the Pabst brewery—an order that opened floodgates that, despite disposable lighters and the surgeon general, still have not closed.

Windows on another time …

When, nearly thirty-five years ago, Oliver Jensen helped found this publication, photographs were largely regarded as second-class historical material—interesting enough, but frivolous in the company of such scholarly apparatus as footnotes and text citations. That’s all changed now, and Jensen had a good deal to do with the change. In a lively and personal essay, he follows the apotheosis of the old photograph from novelty to vital historical tool, and chooses some of his favorite images from a lifetime of looking.

Getting television wrong …

There’s a crisis you’ve probably forgotten about. In the 1950s it was widely believed that television was a powerful new opiate capable of changing the American people into mindless automatons prey to the whim of whoever controlled the broadcasting. Of course, it didn’t happen. Whatever the corrosive effects of television, the medium has not made Americans docile. Walter Karp explains how so many people could have been so mistaken.

In his 1844 essay called “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson urged American poets to fashion a distinctive art from the facts of American life. “Banks and tariffs,” he wrote, “the newspaper and Caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphi, and are as swiftly passing away. … Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”

“Voices and Visions,” a new weekly television series beginning this month on PBS, shows how right Emerson was. Thirteen of America’s most important poets are given an hour each: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath. I have seen six of the programs, and, if the rest are anywhere near as good, they constitute one of the finest, most imaginative series ever.

How much did we lose?” my wife asked me on the day the stock market sank like a stone last October. I did some quick arithmetic and answered, with remarkably good cheer under the circumstances, that we had lost only a little more than two times our annual income.

To cushion the blow, I quoted Mark Twain. “October,” he wrote in Pudd’nhead Wilson, “This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. … The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.”

My wife was not amused. “Will we have a depression?” she asked. We had intended to go out for dinner, but even a modest meal at the Chinese restaurant across the street suddenly seemed extravagant. That decision, multiplied ten billion times, was what the experts were talking about on television, using phrases like “the effect on consumer spending.”

They told stories and pictured everyday events, and yet they were useful; they required a great deal of work over a long period of time, but they were to be found in almost every household.

Because most bedrooms were unheated, quilts were obviously essential, the best way to keep warm on a winter’s night; but then, plain blankets would have done that almost as well. More than just a useful object, the quilt was also an indigenous art form, an expression of the yearning for beauty combined with utility that was so typical of the United States in the nineteenth century.

by Betty-Bright Low and Jacqueline Hinsley: Harry N. Abrams; 192 pages.

Sophie du Pont was one of seven children of E. I. du Pont, who emigrated to America from France in 1802 and established a gunpowder manufactory near Wilmington, Delaware. This volume is composed of sketches, diary entries, and letters beginning in 1823, when she was thirteen, and ending with her marriage in 1833. Well-researched and handsomely designed, the book provides a rare and entertaining look at family life in the early Republic.

by Donald A. McKay; Harper & Row; 150 pages.

This is an engrossing book of the howit-works variety—one of those semireference volumes that visually cut things apart to show how they fit together. Combining crisp text blocks and the author’s clear and detailed line drawings, it covers the centuries-long construction of the world’s most important metropolis and how the city continues to be built today.

In sketching the historic background, the author pauses at signal events in building history to show and explain what happened: the coming of cast iron, the elevator, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Flatiron Building, the Woolworth Building. Finally he re-creates in some detail the building of the World Trade Center in the 1960s.

by John Keegan; Viking; 368 pages.

The first day of the Battle of Shiloh in the spring of 1862 ended with a third of the Union force dead, down, or fugitive and the exhausted survivors dreading the dawn that would see the Confederates push them into the Tennessee River. With the darkness came rain, and William Tecumseh Sherman found his commander, Ulysses Grant, standing out in it, chewing on the omnipresent cigar. “Well, Grant,” said Sherman, “we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we.”

“Yes,” said Grant. “Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.”

In “A Tiffany Gift” (September October 1987), the examples of the jeweler’s art with which you illustrated your text were intriguing and well chosen, but I suspect that Tiffany never filled a more unusual order than that which my father, the late Lynn Landrum, columnist for the Dallas News , presented in 1918, when he asked the firm to execute an engagement ring of his own design. What he wanted was a full rose crafted in gold with leaves on each side. The unusual feature of the ring was that the diamond was completely concealed within the rose and could be seen only from the back of the ring.

Your article on General Sherman in the July/August 1987 issue was fascinating. I am General Sherman’s great-great-grandson and have been studying his life for several years. I have collected dozens of books, articles, and other memorabilia on him and his impact on this country.

At the end of your article, you mentioned that the last major biography of Sherman was by Lloyd Lewis in 1932. Actually, a first-rate biography, William Tecumseh Sherman , by James M. Merrill, was published in 1971 by Rand McNally.