Main Street To Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture

by Chester H. Liebs; New York Graphic Society; 259 pages; $19.95.

Everyone knows that the automobile has remade the way our world looks, but people are only just beginning to pay serious attention to this enormous transformation. A dedicated “windshield archeologist,” Liebs examines the miles of strips outside every American city, and in auto showrooms and drive-ins, in gas stations and motels, he finds much of the history of our century—and a certain jumbled beauty as well. The captions to his well-chosen pictures often reveal the true fondness that fuels his scholarly inquiry, as in a “rare color view of a taxpayer strip.”