The E. L. Moore eBook is 3!

Three years ago today, on 17 March 2023, I published my eBook, The Model Buildings of E. L. Moore. That was a big day for me. The project began on 3 August 2013 and went on for nearly 10 years. It was a great adventure. 

I still do a few posts on Mr. Moore from time to time. You can see what's new at the tag, E L Moore.

It looks like the eBook has had 2785 downloads. Although in April 2023 I lamented that the eBook was a Non-Thing, I'm quite happy with the number of downloads, which I thought was ok given that it got no mainstream model rr coverage. However, it did get some coverage in the back of a comic book in an alternative universe :-)

If you still haven't got a copy, no worries, I have an infinite number on hand. You can get yours here, or here at Library and Archives Canada.

Book Talk

Google search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"

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. 

Bing search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"

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. 

DuckDuckGo search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"

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. 

Yahoo search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"

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.

Book Talk

It’s closing in on 6 months since the E. L. Moore eBook was released. So far its had 465 downloads, which is 365 more than my wildest expectations. If you’re one of those downloaders, thanks! If not, don’t worry, there’s still an infinite number of copies available.

Although the eBook’s been out for awhile I still think about many of its topics. A few are rather weakly argued, which gives me some heartburn. For example, Moore’s life story up until he becomes a model railroading author is skimpy, and his role as a folk artist is heavy with assertions. I would like to tie those two topics together much better than I have. If new information is found that shores up these or other wobbly parts, well, I do plan to do a second edition in that case. Time will tell.

I’ve been reading Robert Hughes’ 1997 book, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, over the summer. I found his views on American folk art interesting, especially when read in light of E. L. Moore and his relationship to the American Folk Art Building tradition that I discussed in the eBook. Here’s what seems to be the core of Hughes’ thoughts on American folk art in general:

The folk tradition in America only came to be valued when it was almost gone. Today, America has 260 million people, but almost no folk. The forms of folk art were diluted or destroyed - and then “revived” as tourist goods or nostalgic images - by the inexorable pressures of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: store-buying, industrial production, the impact of cities, historical self-awareness. Today, the “high art” view of folk art is tinged with benign condescension: here it is, the innocent social birdsong of early America.

It certainly does capture the spirit of what I think was the evolution of miniature building use in model railroading. 

I couldn’t update you about the eBook without some friendly nagging :-) If you’ve downloaded a copy - again, much thanks - have you also made some sort of contribution to supporting literacy? Say, given to a literacy charity? Donated some books to a Little Free Library? Donated to a church book sale?

Maybe it was you who donated this little book I bought early in the summer at the annual book sale held by the United church down the street from my house. The event was packed to overflowing with books and buyers, which was great to see. I had to promise not to come home with an armload, and I didn’t, but I did sneak in with this little gem, Toys and Models: Dealing with the Construction of a Wide Variety of Toys and Models Both for Indoor and Outdoor Amusement, published in 1948 by C. Arthur Pearson Limited of London as part of its Home Mechanic Series. It’s a shame no author is mentioned.

This is not a book of scissors, paper, and paste projects to keep young kids amused. No, there’s quite a variety of involved builds, and appears targeted at adults and older children. 

ToC and chapter 1 from Toys and Models

The book starts big with its first chapter focused on how to build a kid-sized play automobile powered by either peddles or an electric motor so they can have fun driving their own car. But, it was chapter 9 that sealed the 50¢ deal for me: it’s titled Cardboard Modelling, but it deals exclusively with how to build miniature buildings from cardboard at a level of quality you’d be pleased to display in your living room or on your model railroad. 

Inside chapter 9 from Toys and Models

Chapter 9 also taught me a new term with regard to bending cardboard: stunning. Here’s how the anonymous author describes stunning with respect to the process of folding a bend in some cardboard after its been scored:

To make a clean angular bend, lay the scored card flat on the work table, press a straight-edge on to it with the edge over the part of the bend, then press the card upwards and run the thumb nail along the bend. If the card is at all springy it will have to be “stunned,” that is, bent over flat on to itself and then bent back again to its proper place.

The book’s inside front has a label that says: Property of The Hockley Valley School of Fine Arts and Crafts. I couldn’t find out anything about this long gone school other than its possible location was likely in southwestern Ontario, about 460 km or so from Ottawa. So, this is a well travelled book: published in London, England, resided in an art school library in southwestern Ontario, and then made its way to Ottawa to finally be more-or-less given away at a local church book sale 75 years after publication. 

The book’s inside back cover has a library borrowing card with no entries and an annotation that indicates this was the library’s 3rd copy. No borrowers? A sad situation indeed. 

But, not as sad as the situation I came across a few days ago.

5 children's books rescued from recycling

One morning I decided to take my daily walk early in the morning before the heat cranked up to brain melting levels. It just so happened that it was the day the city picked up residential paper recycling, so all the houses had their recycling boxes out awaiting pickup. The truck hadn’t yet hit our neighbourhood so I could nosily glance at what people were recycling as I went along my way. 

Not too far along my route a bin outside one house stopped me dead in my tracks. Those lovely books over there on the right were stuffed amongst some pizza boxes, peeking out of a black recycling bin. I rescued them, otherwise they’d be pulped by the time you read this. Pulped! Good grief. 

They're all children's books. I didn't examine them in detail during rescue. They looked old and interesting, so I simply plucked them from the bin and hightailed it back home. It wasn't until I looked them over a bit at home that a story started to emerge.

Rose, Tom, and Ned; Hazel's 1900 Xmas present

Here's the inside cover of Rose, Tom, and Ned. The inscription reads:

To Hazel

from Aunt Bess

Xmas 1900

You read that right: it apparently was a Christmas gift in 1900, and now it's just recyclable material, no different than a pizza box, nearly 125 years later.

One of several colour plates in Rose, Tom, and Ned

There isn't any publication information inside. All we're told is that a Mrs. D. P. Sanford is the author. Maybe it's a pirated copy of a legitimate publication, or maybe it was simply considered a commodity. 

Regardless, inside it has several paintings like the one over there as well as numerous black-and-white sketches.

Hazel's 1903 Xmas present: The Children's Shakespeare

Three Christmases go by and I guess the adults in Hazel's life think she was ready for higher level reading material. This is the inscription in The Children's Shakespeare:

"Hazel"

From Uncle Ed

and Aunt Nellie

Xmas 1903

This volume isn't as well illustrated as her earlier present as it's simply a small collection of black-and-white reproductions of paintings presented along with the stories.

But this book does include publication information. The author is the famous children's author, E. Nesbit - full name Edith Nesbit - whose 1913 book, Wings and the Child or The Building of Magic Cities, I discussed here many years ago. The copy of The Children's Shakespeare I found notes it was published by the Henry Altmus Company of Philadelphia in 1900, and Wikipedia tells me the book was first published in 1897, a year before E. L. Moore was born.

The collection then jumps ahead 20 years or so. The last three books of the five date into the 1920s, a mere 100 years ago.

Inscription inside Flower Children

This is the last book in the collection to contain an inscription. It's from Flower Children: The Little Cousins of the Field and Garden and reads:

Katherine

from Aunt Minnie [JL: ?]

Dec. 25 1925

Inside it's noted that the book was published in 1910 by The P. F. Volland Company of Joliet, Illinois. The text is by Elizabeth Gordon and the drawings are by M. T. Ross.

Sample facing pages from Flower Children

Flower Children is basically a big collection of pictures and poems like those shown on the left.

Given the above three books were found together, and what with the gap in inscription dates of a generation, I wonder if Katherine was Hazel's daughter ? I'll never known. The house outside where these were tossed I believe was recently bought by a gentrifier, so the history is lost. 

End papers of Katherine the Komical Kow

The two last books, Three Little Cotton Tails and The Circus (1922) and Katherine the Komical Kow (1926), don't contain any inscriptions or other personalizations, but I'll go out on a limb and suggest Katherine was also a present for the Katherine who received Flower Children back at Christmas 1925. Some adult probably thought giving a child a book whose titular cow had the same name as theirs was hilarious.

For a modern, adult reader, Katherine is probably the more graphically sophisticated of the two. Cotton Tails is more sentimental. To me Katherine's  look seems reminiscent of the Toonerville Trolley cartoons, which began in 1913 so it's style was likely well entrenched in American culture by 1926. And like Flower Children, Katherine was also a product of The P. F. Volland Company.

Well, as charming as these books are, they need to be recirculated - not recycled ! - so I’ll donate them to the next church book sale, or pop them into a Little Free Library. There’s only so much I can do to help them be appreciated again, but hopefully someone will get some enjoyment out of them before they’re once again black boxed for The Grim Pulper.

I don’t want to end on a horror note, so let’s try to wrap up with a modest amount of happiness. During the summer I finally found a copy of Mike Gill’s 1984 book, The Peco Book of Model Buildings. I’ve been looking for a decent, reasonably priced copy for almost 2 years. I suspect in the UK this isn’t hard to come by, but it required some patience over here.

Gill’s book explains how to make model buildings from cardboard, much like chapter 9 in Toys and Models. However, where T&M applied the technique of laying out the walls in a long, foldable strip - hence, the sometime need for stunning - Gill builds his models up from individually cut cardboard walls. I’ve used both methods over the years and prefer the Gill approach, but that’s just me. John Allen used the foldable strip method for his classic Engine House, so I’d say try both techniques.

Inside Mike Gill's book

I like the book. It’s lively with lots of black-and-white line drawings, a centre section with colour photos of finished models, and highly readable and entertaining text. I think Gill might have taken a correspondence course from the E. L. Moore Creative Writing School of North Carolina. I can’t recall ever reading that an intrepid modeller should celebrate with a Kit-Kat and Tequila the accomplishment of getting his first little building to stand up, but that’s Mike’s advice and I salute him for it :-) Not for him the clinical writing of our era.

One last thing before I leave for coffee, if you can recirculate your unwanted books, please do so. It might be of benefit to some reader, young or old, somewhere out there. I know, it’s easy for me to say as it can be darned inconvenient. At least try to give it some thought before leaving a curb side offering for The Grim Pulper.

Violating the laws of time travel

I sneaked the time machine out of the garage early one morning last week and set the controls for 355 Lexington Avenue, N.Y., N.Y., May 1975.

I thought I'd try and disrupt the flow of time.

It only sort of worked. 

There are still a lot of kinks to be worked out with the whole time travel thing.

E. L. Moore eBook now at LARC

Entry for E. L. Moore eBook at Library and Archives Canada

The E. L. Moore eBook is now available online at Library and Archives Canada. 

The E. L. Moore eBook is a Non-thing

I’m reading Byung-Chul Han’s recent book, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. It’s fascinating, and has a lot to say about model building if read in a certain frame of mind. Although, before I got deep into that line of thought I was stopped dead early on by Han’s comments on eBooks:

For Benjamin, a book has a fate insofar as it is a thing, a possession. It carries material marks that give it a history. An e-book is not a thing, but information; it has an altogether different status of being. Even if we have it at our disposal, it is not a possession. It is something to which we have access. An e-book reduces a book to informational value. The book has no age, place, craft or owner. It lacks the auratic distance from which an individual fate could speak to us. 

A couple of things to note before we move on. First, the italics are Han’s. Also, the sentence, “The book has no age, place, craft or owner” I think has been mistranslated from the original’s German, and should instead read, “The e-book has no age, place, craft or owner”. I think that makes more sense in the overall context of the discussion.

There’s more to his thoughts on the eBook, but that snippet seems to capture the gist of it. 

Overall I agree with his position on the eBook. It is a degraded form of book. I would have preferred the E. L. Moore book to appear as a paperback instead of exclusively as an eBook, but ultimately the form of delivery was determined by money: a physical book would have cost too much and have severely limited its reach.

My first move in the early days of putting the book together was to see if any of the model railroad publishers would be interested in it. None were. That wasn’t surprising and I don’t fault them for their position. E. L. Moore was born in the 19th century, died in 1979, and his heyday as a model maker was from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, so the audience that would recall him and his work is limited. Also, his approach to model making and model railroading has been long out of fashion, so this further reduces the potential set of buyers. Publishers are businesses, and there’d be little money to be made from the book.

I looked into print-on-demand options, but given the number of colour images and page count, the cover price was hitting $100. At those prices even I wouldn’t buy my own book :-) And there was no way I could afford to print copies on spec. What about a kickstarter type thing? I’m not interested in begging.

In the end it was an eBook or nothing. Nothing was not an option because I wanted to preserve the core of the E. L. Moore research in a more permanent form than a blog, whose existence is at the whims of a giant corporation. At least an eBook is easy to circulate, as long as it’s not DRMed of course. And it’ll eventually be on file at Library and Archives Canada.

Maybe the aura only exists in the depths of the E. L. Moore Archive?

So, yes, the E. L. Moore eBook will never have the auratic attributes Han and Walter Benjamin identify with physical books. But, not all physical books do. Most live ignominious lives and end up in landfills, or are pulped. It’s only a rare few that pass from reader to reader over the ages, collecting the artifacts of use, age, and love. Those are indeed beautiful and significant. With the eBook I’ve settled on its ability to circulate as its good, which I think is important. 

It might not have the potential for an aura that a physical book does, but the E. L. Moore eBook can readily circulate, which may ease the process of finding simpatico readers in this day and age. Given the world’s high inflation and ubiquitous electronic devices, hopefully the eBook format is less prone to biblio-sclerosis, and is effective at getting the E. L. Moore word out.

Really? Can it ‘get the E. L. Moore word out’ and cajole readers into taking Moore seriously by learning about him, and trying out his methods and approaches for themselves? I’d like to think so, but I’m growing more skeptical. One reason, which dawned on me while reading Han’s book, is the disconnect between how Moore made his models and created his articles (real, hand-made, physical processes) and how I created the eBook (mostly virtual, digital processes). There’s some sort of conceptual leap from the digital to the physical required on the part of the reader that might be impossible to enact in our interneted world. More on this later. 

I must say though, Han’s book packs a lot of ideas into very few pages. 

E. L. Moore book notice in April '23 Interchange

A notice for the E. L. Moore eBook appears on page 14 of the April 2023 issue of the Ottawa Valley Associated Railroaders' newsletter, The Interchange. Today the OVAR newsletter, tomorrow the New York Times bestseller list :-) Oh, wait, it's not for sale, it's free :-)

The E. L. Moore eBook is done….and it’s free!

First things first. The book is available in two formats: pdf and ePub. Download whichever one you like, or both, they’re free:

The Model Buildings of E. L. Moore (pdf)

The Model Buildings of E. L. Moore (ePub)

The eBook is 225 pages long and contains 617 high resolution images. The pdf version weighs in at a hefty 278.8 MB, while the ePub is a slightly slimmer 249.3 MB. It also has chapters discussing E. L. Moore’s life as a model maker, raconteur, accidental kit designer, and folk artist, as well as a bit of his personal history. An extensive bibliography finishes things up. 

I’ve chosen to produce an eBook at this time and wrap up what’s been found about E. L. Moore as I’m concerned that one day soon Google, or Alphabet, or whatever they’re called these days, will pull the plug on Blogger, and the E. L. Moore content I’ve posted here for the past 10 years will suddenly disappear. An eBook will help it live a bit longer.

Also, the eBook format allows the information that has been presented as a sequence of posts in time to be structured into a more logical narrative. Now, the book isn’t just posts that have had covers slapped on them; no, the posts formed the source material, and all the information has been rewritten, cleaned up as best I could, and reorganized.   

Sample pages

As a child in the late 1960s, and on throughout the 1970s, I loved to read and write. I’d read just about anything I could get my hands on. When I first ‘discovered’ Mr. Moore’s work in the summer of 1973, it was in the pages of a magazine, and for years I continued to read all the model railroading magazines I could find. My introduction to model railroading was via the written word and photographs, and later the hobby shop - there weren't any near my house. Those old articles also introduced me to the idea of exchanging technical information and discoveries via articles and papers, which helped to set up the beginnings of my career in science and engineering. 

While on the E. L. Moore trail for the last 10 years one thing I found quite interesting that was new to me was that Mr. Moore was also a voracious reader, not to mention a regular writer who seemed to have his fingers glued to his typewriter. At one point in the 1950s he claimed to have a library of nearly 1,000 volumes, and I later learned he was a regular patron of his local library, didn't watch or own a tv, and read a newspaper or two every day. And we know he was a dyed-in-the-wool lifetime letter writer with an extensive correspondence. I kind of feel a Fellowship of the Word with him :-) So, look, if you want to compensate me for this book, why not send some money over to a literacy charity in your part of the world. The ability to read and write is just as important today as it has ever been, and still has the power to unlock imaginations.

Well, that’s it for me for awhile. I hope you enjoy the book, and happy Saint Patrick's Day!