Book Talk: Three for the Lawn

Kim Adams: Bruegel-Bosch Bus | Kim Adams: One for the Road | Kim Adams

I've written a lot about Kim Adams' work over the years, but I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I've never gotten around to buying those three books shown above. Since I'm back to studying artists' use of miniatures, I figured this was a good time to have a look.

These three titles span many years, and as the years go on, the books get bigger in size. 

The rightmost is simply titled Kim Adams. It's an exhibition catalogue published by two galleries to accompany two shows of Kim Adams' work. One was at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto from 23 June to 3 September 2001, and the other was at Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square from 5 May to 12 August 2001.

The middle one is also an exhibition catalogue for another show of Kim Adams' work called Kim Adams: One for the Road. Although the book was published by Museum London, the show was held at three galleries: Museum London, October 20, 2013 to January 6, 2014; Art Gallery of Hamilton, February 8, 2014 to May 4, 2014; and Varley Art Gallery, September 13, 2014 to January 11, 2015.

The leftmost book, Kim Adams: Bruegel-Bosch Bus, was published by the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2021 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Adams' Bruegel-Bosch Bus that is on permanent display at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

All three contain extensive photos of Adams' work, essays by art critics, and interviews with Adams.

I’ve never felt comfortable commenting on critical essays as I’m not well versed in the arts to say much of anything as to the essays’ insights and assertions. I read them though, and give them consideration as they’re usually interesting if they aren’t mired in insider jargon. However, it’s the photos and interviews that intrigue me the most. 

I have seen some of Adams’ work up-close-and-personal as they say, and have written a little about those encounters, but mostly what I’ve seen are photos of his work.There are lots of photos online, and you can get a good sense of many aspects of his work from them. I should note that the 2021 Bus book is the best collection of photos of the Bruegel-Bosch Bus I’ve come across. I’ve seen that work in person, and I’d say it defies photographic representation. Photos just don’t capture the experience of interacting with it; however, those in Bus come pretty darn close. The other two books have good collections of photos as pertain to the shows they are representing. In Kim Adams I particularly like the chapter of photos and texts rather cheekily called Kim Adams’ Vocabulary: Catalogue of Products and Instructions for Use by Tomas Pospiszyl. 

All three books cover all aspects of his art, although general coverage is a little thin in Bus, which focuses on the BBB. As far as I can tell his artistic creations fall into roughly 5 categories: Large 1:1 scale assemblages / ‘kitbashes’ (often referred to as ‘Street Remakes’), items that look like kitbashed plastic scale models, dioramas incorporating kitbashed pieces and model railroading items, large layout-like pieces, and drawings. Adams’ themes and interests flow and weave throughout all the categories, and they really can’t be considered in isolation from each other, but in this post I’m only going to focus on some aspects of his kitbashed plastic kit based work and his layout-like pieces.

As I mentioned, it’s the interviews that really grabbed my attention in these books. There are three, one in each: 

with Marc Mayer (held on 22 March 2001) in Kim Adams

with Robert Enright (held 23 October 2012) in Kim Adams: One for the Road

with Melissa Bennett (various times around 2020) in Kim Adams: Bruegel-Bosch Bus

One thing though that seems to be missing from these interviews, or is somewhat skirted over, are questions and discussion regarding early influences from model building and model railroading. Naturally, the conversations stay mainly in the art groove, but look, I’m a model maker, a kitbasher, and a model railroader, and chances are you are too if you’re reading this, so I find it quite interesting that my interests are being used in interesting ways in the art world :-) Adams is using unusual media for the art world, plastic model kits and model railway gear for his small scale pieces and giant layout-like things, but the, let's say the model building world influences, aren't discussed in interviews with the depth that the art world influences are. This isn't unusual given the backgrounds of the interviewers, but I think adding a little investigation into how the hobby and art worlds come together in Adams' work would help give us a little more insight into it.

There’s often a pattern in the lives of model builders and model railroaders. It goes something like this: as a child there’s a fascination with model making or model railroading, it lasts maybe until high school, sometimes through high school, but then life takes over with education, careers, and family, but then in middle-age the model building or model railroading bug strikes again and the activity is resumed with renewed vigour. This is a stereotype of course, but it’s more-or-less the trajectory of a lot of people, and I wonder if it applies here and might help unearth those early hobby influences in more detail.

So, ok, with this in mind, I tried to piece together some of Adams’ early life story from the disconnected pieces available in some interviews and online bios I could find. Before we dive in let me say I’m no expert, so if you see errors in what follows, please let me know.

Kim Adams was born on 17 December 1951in Edmonton, Alberta. His father was Alvin Clarence Adams and his mother was Harriett Maude Eliott. In World War II his father was an engineer, and his mother was an anti-aircraft gunner. There’s an interesting black-and-white photo in Bus dated 1953 with the caption: “Kim as a child with his brothers, and their father’s model train layout.” The photo shows very a small child, which I assume is Adams given the date, and three other considerably older boys, who I assume are his brothers. You can see the layout’s benchwork, which looks a little plywood-pacificiky at this stage, in what appears to be a room walled by cinder blocks, maybe it's a basement or garage. This is the first time I've heard of there being model railroading in his family life.

When I saw that photo so many questions popped into my mind. Was Adams’ father a long time model railroader, or was it just a dalliance? Were there model railroading magazines lying around the house? Did any of it have any influence on Adams’ interests later in life? I don’t know. 

Ok, so let’s continue the timeline. Adams mentions in the Bus interview that the family relocated to Australia when he was seven for his father’s job. So, let’s say that was sometime in 1959.

So, ok, we’re in 1959 and Adams is 7. In the Enright interview he asks Adams this:

“Enright: Were you a model builder or a model railroader as a kid?

Adams: I was always making models. I think the very first one was in Australia. I was seven and the PT 109 model was out. Everybody in the company my dad worked for got one and because he worked night shifts, he said he would help me in the morning when he got back from work. But I had already built it by the time he got home. That was it; he never volunteered again. But we did other things, like take motors out of cars and build houses.

Enright: So you very quickly moved beyond the PT 109 kit to make things on your own?

Adams: I think so. There was somebody in the area who was carving boats out of balsa wood and motorizing them, and I picked that up from him. Balsa wood was the first thing you could use to build from scratch. You can play with it quite a bit, too. Then later it was finding things, dragging them in, and banging them together. I don’t try to invent a train engine or something.”

Top: Lindberg's PT boat kit from 1959 | Bottom: Revell's 1963 release

I did some internet searching and found that Lindberg released an all plastic 1:64 scale model kit of a PT boat in 1959. It was a variation of a kit they first released in 1955. This kit didn’t have PT-109 emblazoned on the box top, but simply said Patrol Sea Raider, and earlier versions said P.T. Boat. Lindberg released the kit again in 1963 with a new box that said P.T.109. I suspect this was to coincide with the movie PT 109 that was released in June 1963. Also in 1963 Revell released a PT 109 kit, and I suspect it too was to get in on the movie release action. Is Adams misremembering dates? I don’t know, but, look, I can’t really remember things from when I was seven. Maybe the important thing is he clearly remembers the first kit he built, and that he was quite young when the model building bug hit, even though the kit’s brand and date might be elusive. In 1963 Adams would have been 11. 

I had a feeling of déjà vu when I read those passages from the Enright interview. I had a couple of old magazines that featured Adams interviews, so I dug them out to have a look. I turns out there’s also an Enright-Adams interview in the January 1999 issue of Border Crossings magazine. The interview was held in December 1998, 14 years prior to the one in One for the Road. Consider this segment from the 1998 interview:

“Enright (1998): Did you make models as a kid, or were you a junior railroader?

Adams (1998): Not a railroader but I definitely built models. I started in Australia. I got a little PT boat, I think it was Kennedy’s PT 109. My father was going to help me build it but he didn’t come home so I built it myself. My parents just kept throwing models at me after that. I took to the military ones for awhile and then borrowed my brother’s lighter fluid and burned them in the carrot patch and got in trouble. I didn’t have good guys or villains in mind. It was just basic killing.

Enright (1998): How did you end up in Australia?

Adams (1998): I was born in Edmonton but we went to Australia when I was a kid. My father was a policeman for awhile and then he was a streetcar driver. He had a buddy who moved to Australia and he just followed him out at some point. We lived in a tin shack for awhile. It was outside of Melbourne. Nunawading was probably the closest town, and then we were in an area called the Dandenong. Eventually dad built a house. I think I was about seven when we moved and we were there for five years. For a kid it was just adventure.”

Although not exactly the same, there are parts that are quite similar. In this one though Adams mentions his parents were providing lots of model kits, and he enjoyed building them.

Left: Border Crossings, January 1998 | Right: C, Summer 2001

I also dug up the Adams interview with Rafael Gomez-Motiana in the summer 2001 issue of C magazine. Here’s what Adams had to say about his early beginnings with plastic model kits:

"Gomez-Motiana: So all of your works are models, whether full-scale models, or miniature scale models. How did you actually get into miniature scale? Was it through constructing studies for your larger models?

Adams: My first memory of sniffing glue at a young age was when I built a model kit of President Kennedy’s boat [JDL: PT 109]. After that I was constantly building models. Especially cars. Model building was big. Then it disappeared. At the University of Victoria [JDL: Adams attended between 1975 and 1977] I got back into making model cars because it seemed to make more sense than learning abstract painting or something like that [JDL: !].

The first car piece I ever saw was by Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim in the 1978-79 retrospective. He had a VW bus on the ramp, together with the survival sleds. And it just made so much sense right there in the gallery, which is basically a car park. Just think: Winnipeg, Regina, these prairie towns, they all have mini Guggenheims. I think that made quite an impact on me, just seeing a car in that high-art situation. I didn’t understand the survival part, I was just thinking, “Ooh, cars look alright in galleries, especially old, rust ones.””

Did Gomez-Motiana fall out of his chair laughing at the suggestion that the Guggenheim wasn’t much different from the parking lots of Winnipeg and Regina? We’ll never know :-) But what we do know, or at least is pretty clear from all the interviews, is that Adams believed himself to be a seriously devoted model builder as a kid, and he makes the statement that model building, especially car models, was a big thing in the 1960s, which it was, and yes, it did more-or-less collapse in the early 1970s. 

"But Barris, even as at ten, was wild about cars,
carving streamlined cars out of balsa wood."

The model car building and slot car craze of the 1960s and early 1970s was an offshoot of the larger custom car craze in the popular culture of the time. If you haven’t done so I’d recommend reading Tom Wolfe’s 1963 essay The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby to get a sense of the craze as only Tom Wolfe could capture. Although the essay was first published in the November 1963 issue of Esquire magazine under the title There Goes [Varoom! Varoom!] That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby it was reprinted in the first collection of Wolfe’s essays in 1965 with the shorter title, which was also the title of the book.

A few issues of Car Model from the 1960s and 1970s.

There was lots of information about model car building circulating at the time in both books and magazines. Two of the biggest enthusiast magazines were Car Model (published out of New York), and Model Car Science (published out of Los Angeles).  Car Model magazine started up with a July/August 1962 issue and ran bi-monthly until September 1963 when it became a monthly, and published as a monthly until its last issue in July 1974. Model Car Science ran as a monthly right from the beginning in April 1963 until its last issue in July 1972. 

Some winners at the MPC/WKNR car model contest held 23-25 Jan 1970 in Detroit.
Stack of 4 photos on the far right feature George Barris examining some entries.
Car Model, August 1970.

Model car building magazines weren’t confined to the US. Other publications that either were devoted to model cars or covered them also started up in that late 1950s and early 1960s era and include titles such as Model Cars, Model Roads and Racing, and Airfix Magazine. Buying these magazines wasn’t limited to specialist hobby shops as many were readily obtainable in places like smoke shops, grocery stores, jug milk stores, and pharmacies. I won’t go into the vast range of books available at the time, but again, they were easily obtainable at public libraries. The point is you didn’t really have to go out of your way in that era to find out what was going on in the wider world of the hobby. Much like our electronic internet is everywhere, that old paper-based internet was just about accessible everywhere too. 

Left: Some entries in the Monogram Tom Daniel Design Contest; Car Model June 1971.
Right: Kim Adams' Surfer Rick, 2001; from Kim Adams.
Surfer Rick has strong stylistic similarities to wild custom model builds of the 60s & 70s.

I wonder if Adams was influenced by any of that literature? I know I was. Once I stumbled across Car Model at a local smoke shop in the summer of ’72, model building for me took a whole other direction. Kitbashing wasn’t something I knew about until I read about it. Well, not by reading articles about ‘kitbashing’, I don’t know when I learned that term, but seeing the results of using parts from several kits, and maybe modifying them a little. Kitbashing without knowing I was ‘kitbashing’. I usually thought of that work as ‘customization’. I think I learned the official term sometime later. The Gomez-Motiana interview touches on kitbashing a little:

"Gomez-Motiana: Both your full-scale work, if we can call it that, as well as your miniature work, is assembled from off-the-shelf components, things you can buy, whether actual car parts or model-car-kits. Where does the “craft” come into it? Is craft even important here?

Adams: It’s making these model-building kits look like the period, that’s what the craft is. Painting it to look aged and square; they have to look how the kit’s supposed to be made. But then it’s also when you start “bashing” them. All my work is what I would call “kit-bashing.” This is a common term in the industry: you cross breed a Volkswagen with a Cadillac, and you’ve got a kit bash. They must do it in architecture too, although I don’t know if they talk about it in those terms."

When he mentions ‘square’ I have to wonder what that means. Square as in all the paint and pieces are aligned properly, or the old hippie meaning of conforming to the norms of the generation prior to the hippies. Given the bits of sly humour in the responses in this interview I have to wonder.

It turns out car customizer George Barris, one of the guys Wolfe talks about in his essay, cross bred a Volkswagen with a Rolls-Royce. It was called the Raspberries Rolls since it was a promotional vehicle built for the rock group the Raspberries sometime in the early 1970s, likely 1972. I can’t quite place a firm date on it, but I should note that Revell came out with a kit of it called the Barris Kustom Rolls / VW in 1973, and the first incarnation of the Raspberries dates from 1970 to 1975. Weirdly, Liberace had a Barris-like Volks-Rolls built for him in the late 1970s to carry his furs and capes around (!).

Well, I don’t know about real architecture, but in model railroading architecture (a new field perhaps? :-) ) kitbashing is certainly a thing. We’ve talked about the king of kitbashing in the 1970s and 1980s, Art Curren, here, and also that Ur-kitbasher of the 60s, Gil Mellé. Did Adams know about these two guys or any of the others doing HO building kitbashes back then? I don’t know. I don’t know what sort of miniature kitbashes he was doing, if any, back in the 1960s or 1970s. Building kitbashes that I’ve seen date from much later. Did he dabble in architectural kitbashes during his UVic days when he got back into model car building? I don’t know.

One thing’s certain though, his HO scale building kitbashes weren’t anything like what was or is going on in the HO scale model railway world. Most model railroad kitbashes are pretty prosaic - square maybe :-) -  and don’t pass the Bug-Caddy Conjecture test. My assertion here is Adams’ HO building kitbashes are heavily influenced by the world of cars and not buildings, but, well, that’s just an assertion at this point.

Long term model builders often have origin stories that stretch back to childhood.

So far we know model building from plastic kits, especially car model building, was a passion of the young Adams. We also know from these interviews that Adams also dabbled in building model boats from balsa, but he denies any activity in model railroading even though it appears his father had at least a passing interest in it, and was even a streetcar driver for awhile. Still though, the interview segments about this early period of Adams’ artistic development, and interest in model buildings, seem cursory when compared to the questioning about influences from the art world. Maybe there isn’t anything more to tell, but model builders who return to building as adults often have rich model building backgrounds to talk about as the years go on. 

From the Enright (1998) interview it’s not clear if Adams moved back to Canada after 5 years, or moved out of the tin shack after 5 years, because in the Bus interview we’re told the family returned to Edmonton when Adams was 15, which was during 1967. So, from the interviews it’s a little unclear when he returned, but I’ll assume the most recent interview, the 2020 Bus interview, is the more accurate as it’s the most direct on this point: “…when I was fifteen, we moved back to Canada…”.

At 15 Adams would likely have been in high school. His online biographies and interviews note a few things about his school years. Over at the Canadian Encyclopedia Adams mentions “My research began in high school while I was skipping classes.” And he once mentioned he attended 12 different schools in 12 years before settling in Victoria. 

When it comes to post-secondary education all the online Adams bios state the first college he attended was the “Northwest Institute of the Arts (1974)”. So, I go online and look for the institute and can’t find any place with that name, but I do find a place called the Northwest Coast Institute of Arts, which was founded in 1974, and in 1976 was renamed Victoria College of Art. I don’t have concrete proof for this, but from what I’ve read about Adams my money is on a typo in his various online biographies. Also, the 1974 in the bio entry would mean he attended the institute the year it was founded. Adams was 22 in 1974. 

His online bios then all go on to note that he attended the Kootenay School of Art between 1974 and 1975, and the University of Victoria from 1975 to 1977, where he got an MFA in 1979. Recall that in the Gomez-Motiana interview Adams stated that while at UVic he got back into model car building. What sort? Kitbashing? I don't know.

Kim Adams' Earth Wagons (1989 - 1991) 
Image Source: Winnipeg Art Gallery

The origins of his model railway-like sculptures are a bit murky to me, but the first one, Earth Wagons, Adams seems to have started construction on it around 10 years after his graduation, and with its incorporation of full-size rolling things, wagons in this case, you can see the influence from his full-size 'Street Remakes' works, some of which are shown in One for the Road and Kim Adams. As I noted at the beginning of this post one can't neatly separate all his works into distinct categories, as they all feed on each other.

Earth Wagons was a long project, and was under development from from 1989 to 1991. However, to me, that seems rather quick for a model railway - ok, model railway like sculpture in this case - of this scope. 

Photos of Earth Wagons shown in Bus from the time it was being built show a large railway trestle with a train running along it as part of the 'layout', and you can see it in the above photo if you look closely, give it a strong model railway feel. Bus notes, along with the Winnipeg Free Press, that Earth Wagons was the precursor to the Bruegel-Bosch Bus. When I look at Earth Wagons I wonder if Adams was coming back to some earlier model railway experience he had, even though he wasn't a "junior railroader", and integrating it into his artistic mind. 

Today Earth Wagons is part of the Winnipeg Art Gallery's permanent collection. I haven't seen it yet, but hopefully one day.

Kim Adams' Artists' Colony (1987)
Image Source: Canada Council for the Arts, Art Bank

Was the spiritual forefather of Earth Wagons the Artists' Colony diorama, a large piece that looks like a section from a model railway in its use of HO scale items and organization? I don't know.

And that's where I am right now, circling in the I-don't-know cul-de-sac. Well, as you've read, there are a lot of I-don't-knows in the story that I need to resolve, and a lot of bits-and-pieces of story lines I need to stitch together into the big story of influences and development. Some sort of chronological catalogue of Adams' sculptures, maybe similar to the one in the E. L. Moore book, might be needed to help anchor the story in time. The evolution of ideas might then be more apparent with that sort of reference.

I'll wrap up this post right here, obviously incomplete and with lots of hanging threads, because the I-don't-knows are becoming too prevalent and the factual pieces too scarce. However, I'd recommend all three books, but especially Bus because you can see the piece at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the book is a good souvenir of the experience. The other two are good if you want a little fuller understanding of Adams' work in general.

Doodlebug Country and The Case of the Missing RDC-M Prototype

Interurbans Special #77

Back in early April we visited the Prescott model railway show. It was wall-to-wall people, layouts, and vendors. It looked like a good time was being had by all. I bought a few things of course, and one was the book Doodlebug Country: The Rail Motorcar on the Class I Railroads of the United States by Edmund Keilty, published by Interurban Press in 1982. The book is #77 in the Interurbans Special series. It's a thorough compendium of photos and facts about self-propelled rail cars dating from 1900 to 1960.

Lately I've written very little about books I've bought and read as those posts seemed hardly accessed. I've been reconsidering my stance since finding out about how Anthropic shreds books it has bought after scanning them for consumption by their AI products. I'm a Luddite, and am probably the last one to hear of this, but it was still shocking to me. I read further and learned the practice is quite common at libraries and many other places that deal with books. So, I thought, well, when I'm dead my little library will wind up in a dumpster or shredder, so maybe I should write about what I find interesting in my collection so at least in the future there might be a little pointer in the wild to books that others might find interesting, if any books still exist. Sort of a signal from beyond the grave :-)

That lead RDC looks like a very strange hybrid and is maybe something I'd like to build one day.
The caption in the book has this to say,
"Perhaps the acme in the development of the Budd RDC was the ROGER WILLIAMS train, shown here running as the MURRAY HILL from Boston to New York City at Larchmont, NY, on May 30, 1957."
Photo credit: George E. Votava.

I think I also read somewhere that Anthropic shredded the books because they felt that they no longer had any value once AI had captured the content. I have to admit though that when I read books in the Interurbans Specials series, and other railway books that are photo and illustration heavy, it's not for specific extraction of specific content. I don't have pre-formulated questions to ask that I expect specific answers to, which seems how today's AI seems to work.

Here's how I actually read them, in case any AI is reading this and would like to know :-) 

In the good weather the back porch is where the reading happens. I usually have a small stack of books that for some reason or another I've been thinking about. I gather them up, along with something to drink, coffee, tea, or something stronger depending on mood and time-of-day :-) , pull up a lawn chair, put the books and things on a little table, and settle in.

Me being me, with my model building interests and all, I'm usually drawn first to the photos and illustrations in whatever books are in my stack. I'm just looking for interesting things. When something catches my eye, then the back-and-forth with the text begins as I read and search and think. Sometimes I start with text, but it's usually with images on these expeditions.

On the surface it may sound like something that can easily be replaced with internet browsing and AI questioning. For me though I think the total experience of being outside in good weather, enjoying something to drink, the physicality of the printed pages, and appreciating how easy it is to jump from one page to another, to other books, and back as the search goes on. Maybe a tablet could replace the experience and make it more 'efficient', but I think my efficient is a better efficient as it's a more complete body, mind, and soul experience, and I never know what interesting things I might find.

Oh, and I don't take the books to the shredder when I'm done. No, as time goes on, I'll likely repeat the process with the same books in a different mix when I'm in some other frame-of-mind, thinking of other things. This is where Marie Kondo's work left me horrified. When her work was fairly new I started to read it, but when I got to the part where she recommended cutting out the pieces from books and magazines that 'brought joy' or some such thing, and tossing the rest I nearly passed out. Just because something doesn't 'bring joy' today doesn't mean it won't down the road. I gave up on her writings there and then; they brought me no joy and got tossed.

Ok, well, in good weather, the back porch is where all the reading happens, not just the open ended railway book adventures. There're novels, comics, graphic novels, and so on, last year it was the Inferno while I basked in the sun :-) and this year Purgatorio, and maybe Paradiso if I can survive the trek; there's also sketching ideas in notebooks and so on. Yes, the phone gets out there too, but it hasn't so far replaced my little analog world.

The first railbus, #10, for New Haven by Mack.
The caption reads:
"Prototype Mack railbus 10 initially excited New Haven officials, who ordered nine more. They were delivered, but a new management made scant use of them."
Photo credit: M. D. McCarter Collection.

Before I wrap things up I should mention a little 'discovery' in Doodlebug Country that teased me, lead me astray a bit, but in the end left me with some interesting information I didn't expect to find. Here's the passage that got me thinking for awhile that there really was something similar to an RDC-M way back when, shrouded in the mists of time :-) :

"After World War II, the New Haven was hit hard by rising costs and declining patronage, particularly on its commuter runs out of Boston. In 1952 President Frederick C. Dumaine, hoping that new equipment would rejuvenate the business, purchased no less than 40 Budd RDC cars and used them to increase the number of trains on most routes.

Dumaine also consulted Mack about a smaller, lighter version of the RDC for branch lines and off-peak commuter service. He wanted a vehicle capable of competing with the motor bus with its rider appeal.

The result was in fact a railbus based on the Mack Type C-50 city bus, dubbed Type FCD in honor of Dumaine. The prototype, car 10 [JDL: shown in the above photo], went into service in 1952. The bus body was a single-end design, but in fact the 40-foot long car could operate in either direction, and often did."

When I first encountered that passage I anxiously read more as I thought Mack might be modifying standard RDCs, but no, they stuck to what they knew; however, it turned out these buses-on-rails didn't turn around the flagging commuter business. 

I highly recommend Doodlebug Country. It shows the wide variety of railcar equipment in use in the first half of the 20th century through an extensive collection of photos and detailed tables of equipment.

Book Talk

On Browsing by Jason Guriel

On Browsing inadvertently captures many of the themes I have in mind for the ‘Taronna’ layout. It’s the first book I’ve read that celebrates and reflects on browsing for books and music in Toronto’s brick-and-mortar stores in the pre-smartphone era. The only difference I guess is that for me browsing is also strongly linked to the physical act of being transported to those stores by bus, subway, streetcar, or my own feet. 

Surprisingly, On Browsing’s author is 19 years younger than me, although his mention of his father’s birth year puts him 5 years older than my father. So, maybe an appreciation of browsing isn’t limited to the very old demographic - although it will be soon enough - but maybe there’s also some influence due to the era one’s parents grew up in as the author seems to illustrate with a number of anecdotes. I didn’t just spontaneously start a book browsing habit, it got started tagging along with my father on his excursions. Maybe there’s some clue hidden in the fact that both fathers were children during The Great Depression that inculcated something. Whatever its cause it was passed on to me.

I guess the only minor discrepancy between the author’s browsing experiences and mine have to do with him growing up in the west end and me in the east. His suburban experiences feature Sherway Gardens and Square One, and mine Scarborough Town Centre and Cedarbrae Mall, although when the scene shifts to downtown, there’s pretty much a one-to-one mapping, especially at The World’s Biggest Bookstore when it comes to book browsing.

TWBB has been gone for over a decade now, and a condo has been built on the holy site, but a few steps down Edward St., closer to Yonge, is BMV, a store that sells used and end-of-line Books, Magazines, and Videos as its acronymic name spells out. I browse there when I’m in Toronto, trying to conjure up those old good feelings I’d get at TWBB. Sometimes I get a tingling, like I did a few weeks ago.

I was eyeing some books on a rack and as I peeked over it I saw a book entitled The Architectural Model on a nearby shelf, way down near the floor, and just as importantly, it was wearing a loud red and white sticker proclaiming it cost only $14.99. Normally I don’t pay much attention to modelling books for architects and the construction industry as they have other reasons for making models, but this book looked quite interesting and I thought it might answer some questions I had about the history of using cardboard to make model buildings. As far as I can tell the first book on making cardboard and paper architectural models for architectural purposes was The Art of Architectural Modelling in Paper written by the architect T. A. Richardson and published by John Weale of London in 1859, so I thought maybe there’d be something here that might help out with some questions I had. Oh, and the price was right :-)

I had high hopes for The Architectural Model, but things got off to a bad start when I read something of slight to model railroaders right in the introduction that put me in a foul mood:

“Indeed, the selection and interpretation of modeling material are fundamental to the entire nature of the architectural model. In certain kinds of modeling, such as that for model railways, reality is miniaturized and pebbles are used to depict stones and so forth. Unlike this naïve realistic approach, architectural models use materials such as wood or cardboard to represent building materials.”

This told me the author doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and his knowledge of model railways is stuck at the level of 1950s children’s play with a setup on a rec-room ping-pong table. Yes, it’s often true that real model railroaders make use of found, natural materials like pebbles, stones, twigs, sand, lichen, and so on, but these materials often yield astonishing results because of the fractalness of the natural world. That is, what we see at a large scale is often also present at much smaller ones; that is, self-similarity is present at a variety of scales. It’s actually a rather sophisticated approach to modelling, making careful use of the self-similarity characteristics of the natural world. If you’re a regular reader here you know I often use natural materials when it seems appropriate, so the author’s comment carries a little extra sting.

Then there’s the statement that implies architects aren’t naïve like model railroaders because architects use modelling materials like wood or cardboard to represent actual building materials and aren’t stuck piddling around with only what nature has to offer. Well, model railroaders represent real building materials with modelling materials too, and have done so since the beginning of the hobby, and before that well into its folk art roots. Model railroaders aren’t naïve children.

Well, I stumbled across those sentences on page 2 (!), so I didn’t get off to a good start :-) My frame-of-mind as I proceeded was: what else has this guy got wrong and what don’t I have the background in to recognize whether it’s true or false? So, my trust in this book was low.

I thought I was having a flashback in BMV when I saw those monster kits sitting on the top of a shelf. That's how the Aurora monster kits were displayed in the Painted Post smoke shop.

I jumped ahead and looked for Richardson’s book in the Bibliography as well as references to passages on using cardboard and paper as model making materials in the index. It turns out Richardson’s book isn’t mentioned anywhere, nor is the early history of using card and paper. There are a number of passages on the use of card and paper models by some famous architects, but nothing that amounts to a coherent history. My questions remain open.

You know, this is how it goes sometimes with browsing in the real world. Sometimes a winner turns up and sometimes not. I’m not getting rid of The Architectural Model. I think it’s one of those books I’ll set aside awhile and then come back to later. It has lots of interesting photos that I’d like to investigate further, and some passages I’ve dipped into at random are intriguing and need more study. Maybe in the summer when the winter has fully worn off I’ll dip in again :-)

Contrary to my Toronto experience, I did have some springtime browsing success in Kingston a few weeks ago in a store called Bookland. I found a copy of The First Spike: The early railways, tramways and roads of eastern Ontario by Steven Manders, published in 2017. It’s a beautiful, well researched book full of interesting pictures and stories. The subtitle summarizes what you’ll find inside fairly well, and I assume the title is a riff on Pierre Berton’s classic book, The Last Spike. For $17, it was a great bargain and should make for interesting summer reading out on the back porch.

Well, when it comes to browsing, I never know what will turn up that I didn’t know I needed, even if some findings chafe a bit. That’s the thrill of the thing.

Book Talk

Left: John Olson's 1983 book | Right: Malcolm Furlow's 1984 book

I’d like to say that I have some sort of master reading plan and choose all the books I read and talk about here in some sort of rational manner, but it just doesn’t work that way.

I got to buying and reading these two books in a very roundabout way that maybe has some after the fact logic to it, but it didn’t seem to at the time. If you’ve been reading along here for a while you know I’ve been writing a bit about Tom Daniel and his Bad Water Western layout. I found out that he is a friend of John Olson, and this, along with some pondering about trefoil layouts, got me thinking again about Olson’s Cielo Lumber Company layout that appeared in the January 1974 issue of Railroad Modeler. I couldn’t remember the details of the layout’s trackplan and was wondering if it was some sort of trefoil given what I remembered about the shape of its layout board. It wasn’t, but the search got me wondering if Olson had written anything about making scenery similar to that found in California’s San Gabriel Mountains where the Mt. Lowe railway was located. I recalled Olson was an expert in California scenery, and with a Mt. Lowe inspired railway on my mind, I thought his work might have something for me. 

I went looking.

John Olson wrote a bit for Model Railroader magazine in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Some articles I knew about, and some I didn’t. Here’s a list of what I could find of his 20th century MR publications:

May ’76: A day at Mule Shoes Meadows

May ’77: New life for an old American

Dec ’78: Building and switching Blackhole Mine

Jan ’79: The history of Mescal Lines Consolidation no. 12

May ’80: 50 tons of boxcab fun

Sept ’80: A freight dock for the Mescal Lines

Feb ’81: Tank car water tank

Feb ’82, Apr ’82, June ’82, Aug ’82, Oct ’82, Nov ’82, Dec ’82, Jan ’83, Feb ’83; Jerome & Southwestern HO layout construction series

Nov ’82: A mail-order mine; Although attributed to Olson, this appears to be a joint article with Malcolm Furlow

Jan ’84: The Mescal Lines RR

Oct ’93, Nov ’93, Dec ’93; Tascosa & Calcio HOn3 layout construction series

Olson also wrote some articles for Railroad Model Craftsman. I’ll get to one in particular, his Stop Gap Falls article that appeared in the January ’75 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman, in a future post as it had quite an influence on me when it was published.

The Olson articles that appeared in the late ‘70s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s were a bit of a blur to me. I wasn’t an active model railroader at that time, nor much of an armchair one either. I would buy an issue of MR now and then to see what was going on, but that was the extent of my involvement in the hobby. When it came to magazines it was Creative Computing, Byte, MacWorld, 80micro, MacTutor, and the Whole Earth Review, with a dash of MR and RMC to reminisce. I knew Olson, and Furlow, were doing big things, but how big was a mystery. Forty or so years on I’m finally catching up :-)

One thing I did know was that MR’s publisher, Kalmbach, had collected up the articles in the Jerome & Southwestern series from '82 and '83 and re-published them in 1983 as the book, Building an HO Model Railroad with Personality. I know, I know, the articles are available in digital form in MR’s archives, but I’m partial to physical books, so I spent sometime searching online for a copy in decent condition for a reasonable price. 

When it comes to California scenery, Olson’s Mescal Lines article from Jan ’84 would be the reference as it covers modelling several different regions of the state. His Jerome & Southwestern layout is set in and around Jerome, Arizona. So, if I was looking for very specific instructions on modelling California scenery this wouldn’t be the reference, but it’s very good at presenting his overall approach to model railroading, so I wouldn’t reject it just because it didn’t deal specifically with my narrow interests. 

If you’re reading the works of John Olson, you can’t help but notice the works of Malcolm Furlow come up a lot - and vice versa. Well, that was because Olson and Furlow were friends and colleagues. Furlow is another major figure from that late ‘70s to early ‘90s era I was vaguely familiar with, but I had nothing more than a cursory knowledge of what he was up to. So, I thought, ok, I know Kalmbach also published a book about a Furlow project layout from that era so I figured I’d hunt down a copy of that too. Surprisingly, I found a good copy at a good price at an online seller in Whitehorse in the Yukon! Furlow’s reach was quite long.

The book is HO Narrow Gauge Railroad You Can Build that was released in 1984, the year after Olson’s was published. It’s a collection of Furlow’s articles on his HOn3, Colorado based, San Juan Central project layout that were published in every issue of MR between November 1983 and August 1984, except for January ’84 which featured the article on John Olson’s Mescal Lines.

Like Olson, Furlow had published many articles in the model railroading press before his famous San Juan Central series. His initial appearance in MR was as the first place finisher of MR’s 3rd photo contest in the January ’80 issue. Here’s a list of his 20th century publications in MR:

Aug ’80: White water on the Denver & Rio Chama Western

Mar ’81: Modeling Furlow’s Slough

July ’81: Sheridan, Colorado: 1927

Nov ’82: A mail-order mine; Although attributed to Olson, this appears to be a joint article with Malcolm Furlow

Dec ’82: The Bern & Wagonlit RR; A report on Rosemary McKee’s Z-scale layout

July ’83: Fred Gill’s Diamond Valley Line

Aug ’83: It’s 1916 again in downtown Dallas; co-written with Craig Kosinski

Nov ’83, Dec ’83, Feb ’84, Mar ’84, Apr ’84, May ’84, June ’84, July ’84, Aug ’84: San Juan Central HOn3 construction series

Sept ’84: Model Railroad Photography

Dec ’84: Vic Butterworth’s N scale railroad

Jan ’85: The San Jose Society of Model Railroaders

Aug ’85: The Peninsula Model Railroad Association

Dec ’85: Harry Clark’s Indian Creek Valley Ry.

Jan ’86: The Silverton & Telluride Ry. Co.

Feb ’86: Deciduous Anyone?; written by Billy Haynes with Furlow’s photos (with Furlow appearing in one!). The article’s subtitle is, “Malcolm Furlow’s technique for making large, broadleaf trees”, so it almost seems like a Furlow article.

Oct ’86: The Magical Time Machine

Oct ’86: Adventures in G

Nov ’86: How white-metal castings are made

Nov ’86: Further adventures in G

Dec ’86: Tom Kunkel’s Lionel layout of the ‘80s

Oct ’87: Ted Hough’s HO Canadian Pacific Ry.; co-written with Paul Scoles

Jan ’88: Feb ’88, Mar ’88: Carbondale Central HO construction series

Sept ’89: Ken Davis’ Great Northern Ry.; co-written with Paul Scoles

Dec ’89: The Tomahawk & Lobo Creek RR; co-written with Paul Scoles

Mar ’94: Building the Silver Canyon Road

One thing that jumps out of the list are the number of articles he wrote reporting on other peoples’ layouts. He also provided the photos for those articles. What I don’t note in the list are all the articles written by other authors for whom he shot the photos, and there are many. Furlow was a master of model railroad photography, and MR made good use of his talents. If all you see of Furlow’s photographic work is what is in his book, you’ll get a good sense of what a master he was.

In some respects the two books seem very similar. Both deal with building modest sized layouts whose themes are locations in the southwestern USA at a time in the early 20th century when steam locos, early small diesels, ICE automobiles and trucks, and horse-drawn wagons roamed together in a down-at-the-heels milieu. Both present model railroad layout building as a family-oriented activity. Sons and daughters and wives make guest appearances throughout the pages. Both present the completed layouts as attractively finished and convivial items that wouldn’t look out of place in a family room or den. They don’t present the layouts as eccentric things to be relegated to a basement or garage. Both took about a year to build. Olson notes in the last chapter of his book that his layout was “six months abuilding in the back room of Ron’s [JDL: Ron Dickson's] design studio” and also notes in the same chapter “… over a year while the railroad took shape…”, so I’d guess and say it took roughly a year. Furlow notes in his Acknowledgements section that he spent 13 months on his project.

And finally, both books are in Kalmbach’s high class style they were famous for in that era. Neither crude and simplistic computer graphics nor Powerpoint-itis and business-school-speak are anywhere to be found in these books. Those curses were still in the future. Everything, drawings, text, lists, and photos, are all clean in design and execution, as well as thoughtfully laid out.

And those photos. Wow! You could buy these books for the photos alone and you wouldn’t have wasted your money. Did you read my end of 2023 post in the Book Talk series? The one about art and model railroading? In it I suggested that a place to start thinking about model railroading as art was to study and discuss photos that have some meaning to you. For me, I’d add the photos in these books to the discussion. Given the era we’re now in, maybe we should consider these as art books and not mainly as how-tos as they were when first published. Their high production values, combined with the outstanding photography of Olson and Furlow, I think is what gives them their lasting value even if the how-to methods they show have almost been completely assimilated today.

Although there are many similarities between the books, there are some differences in what’s presented. Layout form is one. But, even that difference seems to eventually loop back towards similarity in a deeper sense.

Olson’s layout has two parts: one is a standard 4’x8’ main layout, and the other is 2’x6’ extension called the Back Alley & Wharf. The reader could focus on building the 4’x8’ part, ignoring the extension, and still end up with a complete layout. Although his 4’x8’ layout is by no means a conventional standard piece of plywood layout of the time, it could fit in one’s footprint, and thereby make no additional space demands.

Furlow’s layout, although narrow gauge and in theory more compact than a standard gauge cousin, requires a 10’x10’ room. Ok, well, if one built Olson’s extension along with his main layout you’d need around a 10’x10’ room too for the whole thing, but the basic setup needing only a standard 4’x8’ space seems a good selling point for the time. Furlow’s layout might be condensed a little by leaving off the rightmost of its three modules: the Montrose module. It looks like if one didn’t build Montrose, you would still have a complete layout, and a little smaller one too. 

The footprint of Furlow’s layout looks more freeform and flowing than Olson’s, whose perimeter is made up of a big rectangle for the 4’x8’, and a little one for the 2’x6’. Furlow’s may have been a result of his philosophy that: “I’m not one for doing a lot of advance planning, and I tend to design as I go along. Nor am I afraid to make changes.” This is not to say that Olson was wedded only to formal planning. He discusses at length in chapter 2 the need for creating a full-size plan from whatever small plans you’ve created because you’ll no doubt find issues that are better encountered and worked out at a full-size plan stage with pens and rulers than at a later saws and lumber stage. Look at this photo of him (below, on the left) laying out the full-size plan on a piece of paper taped to a wall:

Yeap, on the right that’s the famous Hans Namuth photo of Jackson Pollock in action. For some unknown reason when I saw that photo of Olson deep in layout planning my mind flashed on that Pollock picture. I think it’s because I believe layout planning and design is a full body activity, and in that regard there is a connection between Furlow, with his design as he goes along, making real-time changes, to Olson with his full size wall plans to work out tricky track details, and Pollock with his drip action paintings. Look, a layout is a large physical object, laced with copious amounts of colour and movement, so it seems odd to me that planning such an object should be the exclusive domain of small drawings and neat little plans. There’s a contradiction there that Olson and Furlow don’t suffer from in these books. It seems an unspoken design philosophy.

As a sidelight in Playing with Trains Sam Posey presents us with a visit he and Bob Hayden made to Malcom Furlow’s New Mexico ranch in the early 2000s. By this time Furlow had been gone from model railroading for quite a while, and although he was now a successful painter, he was in the process of making a comeback to the hobby. One of the many interesting things noted about Furlow in this section of Posey's book was a modelling technique Furlow developed soon after he got into photography in the ‘70s: “He would position his lights [JDL: his photo lights that is] and keep them on as he worked, creating a composition of light and shadow. He began constructing scenes with a picture intended as the final product, not the modeling.” He used lighting as a tool to create scenes while they were being constructed, which gives us some insight into why his scenes are so dynamic and photogenic. In the book Posey seems to imply this was a well established modelling method Furlow practiced well before the San Juan Central was built, so I speculate it was part of Furlow’s “design as I go along approach” applied during that layout’s creation. This appears to be another instance of going beyond intellectualized layout planning in favour of engaging in physical processes. 

That particular Furlow observation resonated with me as I recently read these thoughts of Paul Valéry in Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Storyteller,

“Artistic observation can attain an almost mystical depth. The objects on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in his own inner self.”

The San Juan Central still exists and is part of The Magic of Model Railroading exhibit at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. I wonder what Furlow would have thought of how his layout was lit. 

I’ll have to think about light and shadow more. I’ve had John Alton’s Painting With Light on my shelf for years. I need to read it again. It might be a place to start.

Ok, as well as unspoken design philosophies the books also contain a smattering of spoken ones, ok, well, written ones :-) Here are a couple:

Olson: “The key to building and enjoying a successful pike isn’t buying the most expensive products available; it’s using what you can afford creatively.”

Furlow: “Besides being dramatic, vertical scenery offers many layout planning advantages. Mountains can be used as view blocks to prevent us from seeing the entire layout at once.”

There are others, but I’ll leave discovering them for you.

Now, you might be saying, “Weren’t these principally how-to books, not philosophical and artistic tomes?” Yes they were, and I know haven’t commented on the efficacy of the books’ how-to information. Here’s the thing: if you consider the models and techniques as individual, stand-alone entities and processes you might say they’ve been surpassed in comparison to the products and methods available today. You might have something there, but I think you need to look at the modelling in terms of the overall composition of the layouts, and consider how each layout element makes a visual contribution. For example, we can buy far more detailed and accurate boxcars than what are shown in Olson’s book, but when looked at as part of a scene, the vehicles and how they have been detailed and weathered look just right. I find the photo that spans pages 2 and 3 particularly illustrative in this regard. The components of the train in that image aren’t particularly fine by today’s standards, but when carefully weathered in accordance with Olson’s instructions, and composed on the layout with all its other elements, there is an overall rightness to the scene. In short, it’s the scene that matters, and how the individual elements contribute to it. I’ll have to try some of Olson’s and Furlow’s methods before I comment further.

Before we wrap things up and go for coffee I have to mention the unspoken presence hovering over these books: the legendary John Allen. Both Olson and Furlow credit Allen's work as being a strong initial inspiration. Well, Furlow goes a bit further and says that an article he read by Olson in the ‘70s was what inspired him to redouble his efforts in model railroading. I don’t know much about John Allen other than the legend and a few of his photos. I know there was a book by past MR editor Linn Westcott called Model Railroading with John Allen that Kalmbach published in 1981. Maybe I need to get logical, find a copy to buy, and write about it in the next Book Talk. Stranger things have happened :-)