A letter of recommendation from the New York Times.
I just submitted a proposal for the next book with them:
A sequel to this one.
We'll see what happens. I'll even call myself a "geeky enthusiast!"
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Here's text of the article by Kathleen Rooney, in case you can't access the NYT link:
During my summer and winter breaks from college, I worked at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Ill. This was in the early 2000s, when the store was run by the fifth generation of the Anderson family. The business had existed for over a century before my arrival, though it wasn’t always a bookstore: Founded as W.W. Wickel Pharmacy in 1875, it originally included books and toys among its wares. The family then opened Paperback Paradise, dedicated solely to books, above the drugstore in 1964, and since then, what’s known today as Anderson’s has moved and expanded multiple times.
I started looking into all of this not because of friendly conversation with the owners or chatter among my colleagues: I first read about Anderson’s humble beginnings in a book called “Downtown Naperville” from Arcadia Publishing, a South Carolina-based company that, since 1993, has been cranking out hyperlocal books of historical photography about communities across the United States. Back then, during slow evening hours when customers were scarce, I’d sit behind the cash register with my back to the windows facing the downtown streets and read — in a kind of textual mise en abyme — the description of those streets in Arcadia’s first book about the town, titled simply “Naperville.”
Arcadia Publishing — through series like Images of America and Postcard History — aims to reconnect “people to their community, their neighbors and their past by offering a curbside view of hometown history.” Their slogan, “Find Your Place in History,” plays out across the 15,000 titles in print, written by geeky enthusiasts whose qualifications tend to arise largely from their residence in the places in question. There’s at least one title on every single one of America’s 50 states, and each title follows a similar formula: an introduction consisting of a casserole of minutiae rather than any overarching argument, followed by an unexpectedly moving series of photo-packed chapters that feature quotidian people engaging in all the banal activities that compose a life.
During my summer and winter breaks from college, I worked at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Ill. This was in the early 2000s, when the store was run by the fifth generation of the Anderson family. The business had existed for over a century before my arrival, though it wasn’t always a bookstore: Founded as W.W. Wickel Pharmacy in 1875, it originally included books and toys among its wares. The family then opened Paperback Paradise, dedicated solely to books, above the drugstore in 1964, and since then, what’s known today as Anderson’s has moved and expanded multiple times.
I started looking into all of this not because of friendly conversation with the owners or chatter among my colleagues: I first read about Anderson’s humble beginnings in a book called “Downtown Naperville” from Arcadia Publishing, a South Carolina-based company that, since 1993, has been cranking out hyperlocal books of historical photography about communities across the United States. Back then, during slow evening hours when customers were scarce, I’d sit behind the cash register with my back to the windows facing the downtown streets and read — in a kind of textual mise en abyme — the description of those streets in Arcadia’s first book about the town, titled simply “Naperville.”
Arcadia Publishing — through series like Images of America and Postcard History — aims to reconnect “people to their community, their neighbors and their past by offering a curbside view of hometown history.” Their slogan, “Find Your Place in History,” plays out across the 15,000 titles in print, written by geeky enthusiasts whose qualifications tend to arise largely from their residence in the places in question. There’s at least one title on every single one of America’s 50 states, and each title follows a similar formula: an introduction consisting of a casserole of minutiae rather than any overarching argument, followed by an unexpectedly moving series of photo-packed chapters that feature quotidian people engaging in all the banal activities that compose a life.
The books risk being pretty boring, committed as they are to weaving together all the dull and shiny little threads that constitute history in these communities. But that’s what I like about them: While many places bid for historical significance by linking their stories to larger national narratives (George Washington slept here!) or engaging in the boosterish lionization of native-born luminaries, Arcadia usually takes a more granular and idiosyncratic approach. I recently became reacquainted with the series while doing research for a new novel; I sought the kind of lived-in texture and worm’s-eye-view detail that imparts a sense of what inhabiting a place might really have been like. The Arcadia vibe is more grandmother’s attic than Smithsonian Institution, more library lecture than college class. Reading its books feels agreeably like being buttonholed by a neighborhood expert bent on convincing you that the town is vastly more interesting than you’d ever imagined.
There’s the photograph in “Eden Prairie,” for example, of two young women in button-up Western shirts and neckerchiefs with their trick horse, Amigo, in 1954, whose caption notes that their performances as the “Rodeo Riders” raised thousands of dollars for such causes as the Rolling Acres Facility for the Handicapped. In “Birmingham,” about a suburb of Detroit, a caption beneath a photograph of a mountain of animal carcasses being trod upon by stylish men and women in early Edwardian garb explains: “During a night run on October 18, 1901, two freight trains collided in a farmer’s field,” killing three crewman and leaving the remains of hundreds of pigs and cattle, which were being transported to market, causing the crash site to be “visited by many fashionable gawkers.”
The series show that history, rather than being committed by distant heroes and warehoused in textbooks, is lived by normal people — always happening on every street, on every block, in every yard, all the time. They give the same credibility to a place like Naperville as they would to New York or Boston, making all of history — not just the famous parts — accessible and scintillating. Read “Litchfield” and learn that the Connecticut town used to have a Whipping Post Elm for public floggings, which “attained a circumference of 150 inches before it died at age 200”; read “Boonsboro” and learn that the first macadam road surface in the United States was installed between it and Hagerstown, Md., in 1823; read “Pigeon Forge” and learn that the resort community in Tennessee is so named because it’s on the Little Pigeon River, which used to power an iron forge there. The esotericism is what makes it work — it feels as if you’re being pulled in to a conversation around a family dinner table.
I went to high school in a little Illinois town called Downers Grove, which, as cynical teenagers, we joked, really was quite a downer. But in “Downers Grove Revisited,” I learned that the Tivoli Theater (attached to the Tivoli lanes, where we learned to bowl in gym class) was built in 1928 and was the second theater in the United States to be designed for talking pictures. It made the town shine with a little vanished glamour. Flipping through the book, I gazed into the eyes of the members of the Downers Grove basketball team of 1920, and the gentle ghostliness of the entire series — so riddled with the lost — hit home; I stared into the faces of the dead, sitting in a place which, even still, is so alive for me.
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