Book Talk

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A year ago today I published my E. L. Moore eBook: The Model Buildings of E. L. Moore. If you don’t have a copy, good news, I have an infinite supply of free ones and you can get yours here :-) You can also get a copy from Library and Archives Canada.

So far it’s had 872 downloads, which is 772 more than my wildest dreams. Downloads have petered off a lot as the months have rolled on. It does maybe 4 or 5 a week these days. I think that’s to be expected as there’s a limited readership for this sort of thing. 

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But, still, for an odd little digital monograph that’s had no notice in the traditional model railroading media, I’m quite surprised at the uptake. I hope it will keep circulating, and maybe E. L. Moore’s work will continue to inspire and entertain modellers young and old. 

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I don’t see a 2nd edition on the horizon, although there are many gaps and weak spots in the research I’d like to fill if I can. If anything comes up you’ll read about it here. And, of course, if you know anything about E. L. Moore and his work, I’d sure like to hear about it and discuss it with you. 

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One of the book’s weakest parts are the paragraphs on what he did between being released from the navy in 1918 at the end of World War I and arriving in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1933. We only have glimpses of his life during this 15 year period: furniture salesman, paper mill worker, vagabond, and who knows what else. He seems to have moved around a bit in the eastern US. He was in New York for a while and there was some wandering in the Great Smoky Mountains. He hints at other places - even a county jail for loitering in some southern town! - in his model railroad articles, but that’s all they are, hints. It’s often impossible to discern what's real and what is Moore just pulling our leg.

Those hints of mid life adventure provide inspiration for many of his projects, as did his boyhood life on the farm prior to joining the navy. He read a lot, studied lots of photographs, and shot the breeze with friends in the hobby a lot, but that information obtained at a remove wasn’t all there was to his inspiration. His own direct experience seemed to be the foundation for his model building work, and he drew on it just as much as from those other sources, maybe more at times. 

A section of the AGO's Tom Thomson panel gallery

We were in Toronto in January and had the opportunity to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario. I wanted to see the Tom Thomson gallery. I hadn’t done any research prior to going. My Tom Thomson ‘knowledge’ at the time was basically: 1) Thomson was a revolutionary wilderness painter, 2) Thomson was tangentially associated with The Group of Seven, and 3) Thomson produced a number of now iconic Canadian landscape paintings. So, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

Thomson is a big name in Canadian painting. Shelves and shelves have been written about him, but here’s his Wikipedia entry for a good summary. He was born in 1877, roughly a generation before E. L. Moore, who was born in 1898. Thomson died in July 1917 about a month before his 40th birthday. Even though he was a graphic designer by trade he practiced as a painter for only the last 5 years of his life. During those years he’d go up north to Ontario’s Algonquin Park in the good weather months for fishing, painting, and canoeing. His art activities consisted of making in situ sketch paintings on small wooden boards of the lakes, rivers, woodlands, trees, lumber camps, and bush. He’d winter in Toronto and turn many of his sketch paintings into proper saleable canvas paintings. To make this way of life happen during those years he appeared to live a very frugal existence.

Unlike Moore who died of arteriosclerosis at age 81, Thomson’s career was cut short when he was not quite half Moore’s age. On 8 July 1917 Thomson went missing on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park and his body wasn’t found until July 16. Some say he was murdered, others say suicide, others say it was simply a canoeing accident. The cause of his death remains a mystery, but what isn’t a mystery was he died at the height of his painting powers and we’re the worse off for it. 

A Thomson canvas painting near panel sources

It’s those sketch paintings he made while up north in the wilderness that caught my attention. I was aware of his larger canvas works, but those little on site sketches were news to me. All I can say is that when I saw them I felt, yeah, yeah, that’s what it’s like out there. I don’t know how he did it but I could feel that he had captured how it is in that environment. Now when I look at his canvas paintings they seem a little remote to me now that I’ve seen their sources.

Thomson's palette / sketch box (NGC photo)

He had a painting system of course so he could do his sketches while in a canoe or out in the woods. Anyone would have to have one so as not to make a mess of things. In preparation for painting season he’d make up a bunch of 8.5” x 11” wood panels, usually of birch, for painting his sketches on. He also had a custom palette / sketch box for taking into the field. That upside-down photo sourced from the National Gallery of Canada shows it. The upper part, at the bottom of the photo, has slots to hold two panels. They allow for a panel to be held for painting while a second panel waits its turn, or is drying. The lower part is for supporting the palette while painting. Two painted panels can be held securely and separately for transport back to camp without worrying about getting them smeared in transit. From that simple equipment, direct observation, and great skill came 400 or so amazing paintings on small wood boards.

After getting back home I found out there was a book published in 2023 about his field sketches called Tom Thomson: North Star. I can’t comment on the quality of its essays, but the draw for me are the 150 nearly full size colour reproductions of his sketch paintings. I recommend the book on the strength of those alone.

I’ve talked about the importance of direct field observation before. I think if we knew more about E. L. Moore’s life when he was ‘out in the field’ during those missing 15 years, we’d be able to better appreciate how his model work developed and its influences. Like Thomson I think Moore made extensive use of his experiences in his work, but unlike Thomson, the record of Moore’s life experiences is quite thin.

You know, maybe I should back away from saying things like “…we’d be able to better appreciate...” because it might only be me who could better appreciate. I don’t think many people are interested in this aspect of model railroading. I’m obsessed with origin stories and finding out influences. My own hobby horse is that direct observation and experience are the most important and best influences, especially in our era. 

In E. L. Moore’s stories he’d often talk about Cousin Cal. These days the friendly, affable, although sometimes slow and bumbling, Cousin Cal has been elbowed out of the way by Cousin SAL, Cousin Screen Attention Lock. SAL seems to be everybody’s cousin, even mine I must admit. He demands everyone’s attention at all times for all things. Seeing and experiencing for yourself without him mediating seems almost sacrilegious, and he’ll do his darnedest to convince you that it is. He encourages conformity and group think and that’s the last sort of influence anyone should want. He’s the influencer’s influencer. I suspect E. L. Moore would not have gotten along with Cousin SAL given that Moore didn’t have much truck with the dominant screen of his day, the tv, even though he did appear on it once. I don’t think Cousin SAL could convince him to watch Gilligan’s Island or The Beverly Hillbillies.

Yes, the irony of me pontificating about the evils of screens on a screen isn’t lost on me. Before I leave and try and stop my head from exploding from the contradictions, let me wrap up by noting two interesting books I found at the AGO gift shop.

The AGO has a large collection of ship models as part of the Ken Thomson collection. Although they share the same last name I don’t think Ken Thomson and Tom Thomson are related. Ken Thomson was at one time the wealthiest person in Canada and donated his vast art collection to the AGO in 2002, which included many works by Tom Thomson and The Group of Seven as well as a large number of high quality ship models. The 2009 paperback, Ship Models, published by Skylet documents the collection. It is obviously a subsidized publication as it’s an extremely high quality product that only cost me something like $14.95 in the gift shop. That’s crazy cheap for what it is: an excellent example of what a book about a scale model collection could be. Estimates I got for producing a similar sort of physical E. L. Moore book would have resulted in a typical retail price of $90US for US sales and $135CDN for Canadian - and those are with me making zero profit. At those prices even I wouldn’t buy my own book.

305 Lost Buildings of Canada was an impulse buy based on the title and intriguing cover. What you see is what you get. There are 305 of those blocky, black and white facade drawings, each with a paragraph telling something about the associated lost building. Although the drawings are sort of reminiscent of Seth’s Dominion caricatures they do give a sense of the buildings. If you’re interested in photos of the real things you can always go to the internet. 

View from Shell / Bulova Tower; late 70s or early 80s

When I stumbled across the entry for Toronto’s Shell Tower (aka the Bulova Tower) at Exhibition Place old memories bubbled up through my grey matter. In olden times I thought it was quite thrilling to go to the top of the tower and look out over the Ex. Maybe it was that memory lurking in my brain that got me to buy the book in the first place: the Shell Tower is dead centre on the book’s cover! Talk about subliminal messaging :-)

Well, a not so subliminal message is nagging me for coffee, so I’m off to refuel my grey cells before they all decide to explode.