BOOKS

The Iron Age

Los Angeles is the only American city to have made its manhole covers protected landmarks. That happened thanks to the work of Robert and Mimi Melnick, a husband-and-wife team that produced a book celebrating them in the early 1970s. Following the book’s success the Melnicks headed out in search of artful manhole covers nationwide, and they found them, turned out by dozens of foundries, stamped in all styles, and going back a full century and a half. In Boston, writes Mimi Melnick, “we were looking at covers stamped with patent dates in the 1840s.”

That marks the rough beginning of the modern manhole era; large-scale water, sewer, and gas systems were rare before then. Some of the most charming early lids were the work of new gas companies trying to put a hopeful face on their supposedly risky fuel.

Robert Melnick’s photographs show each cover the way you would see it looking down. Judging from this collection, Louisville, Kentucky, is the Florence of manhole covers: its early lids sport doily patterns or Gothic traceries that remain lovely despite a century of rugged use. San Francisco’s original Spring Valley Water Works put 116 stars on each of its utility covers; the later Water Department’s meter covers, showing the Golden Gate Bridge, are copied for pricey reproductions. Mimi Melnick documents the foundries, past and present, from which these enduring creations emerged.

False Prophet

The authors, both American historians, begin their superb narrative with the improbable 1835 meeting of two selfstyled prophets from upstate New York: Robert Matthews, better known as the Prophet Matthias, fresh from his murder acquittal in New York City, and Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They met in Kirtland, Ohio, where Smith was building the first of his Mormon cities, and they spent a day comparing their religious visions and divine credentials while a scribe tried to keep up. The next morning the Mormon prophet sent Matthias on his way. “I told him,” Smith wrote in his diary, “that my God told me that his God is the Devil.”

That Matthias’s religion faltered while Smith’s grandly succeeded only adds to the interest of this book: he makes an obscure but luridly fascinating character to follow across America at a time when, the authors write, “the seers of the new republic set the pattern for later prophetic movements down to our own time.”

Robert Matthews was a failed carpenter who had abandoned his wife and children in Albany; in 1832 he presented himself, as Matthias the Prophet, to Elijah Pierson, a wealthy New Yorker who had become unhinged after the death of his wife. Matthias was soon preaching in Pierson’s parlor against women, clergymen, and “all men who wear spectacles.” Eventually he established a “Kingdom” thirty miles north on the Hudson and married himself to the wife of his host, Benjamin Folger. Folger stayed on and took up with Matthias’s daughter. “There is too much changing of wives here,” one visitor said. When the sickly Pierson died of ailments for which Matthias had withheld treatment, it all caved in. The Prophet was tried for murder; he served four months for assault and contempt of court. The only redemption in Matthias’s Kingdom came after its ruin: The household’s servant, a former slave named Isabella Van Wagener, went on the road afterward with a new name that had been revealed to her, Sojourner Truth. This is terrific history.

A Bushel and a Peck

In this compact (5¼-by-6¼-inch), handsomely produced volume, the author, a writer, an illustrator, and a grower, considers ninety of the more than a thousand varieties of apples grown in this country. He provides a fullpage watercolor of each, along with a brief description of its history, appearance, taste, quirks, and charms. Of the Blue Permain he writes, “The fruit glows like plums against the tree’s foliage, and orchard visitors are often stopped in their tracks by the sight.” The Hubbardston Nonesuch, “with its hammered, multicolored surface and russeting,” he calls “a handsomely aging character actor among apples.”

Yepsen includes recipes for cider, brandy, and applesauce, directions for drying and storing, and addresses for ordering fruit or trees by mail. His watercolors are as appealing as old botanical prints, his descriptions as crisp and lively as a Newtown Pippin.

The War in a Scrapbook

Among the pile of new commemorative World War II picture books, this one may do the best job of hitting all the emotional notes at once. With a filmmaker’s eye, Schwartzman, an Englishman turned American, beautifully mixes the evocative knickknacks of the home front—blackout posters, gas-mask instructions on cigarette cards—with uglier reminders of Hitler’s war. A German board game called Jews Out! instructs children to roll dice to be the first to kick six Jewish businesses outside the city walls; a British board game, A.R.P., educates children about air raids, with players hopping from “Fitting Gas Masks” to “Decontamination.” On one page a band of French World War I veterans plays for liberation day; on another chalk graffiti in Berlin list the forwarding addresses of the few survivors of a bombed-out block: “We are all alive.” Even Schwartzman’s D-day material seems fresh, including stainedglass panels commemorating paratroopers and a picture of Canadian soldiers wading ashore carrying their bicycles. This inspired scrapbook accompanies a new film by Mr. Schwartzman; both were prepared with the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

RECORDINGS

Opening Up the Piano

“I want to live in the whole world of music!” wrote the composer Henry Cowell in 1955. He always approached sound as an explorer, seeking new lands, and nowhere is this more evident than in his works for piano. He reached into it to pluck strings, pounded the keyboard with his arms, combined staggering arrays of rhythms, strummed the wires like a harp. He made this recording of nineteen of his pieces in 1963, when he was sixty-six, two years before he died. In the first number, “The Tides of Manaunaun,” Cowell accompanies a simple modal melody with rich clouds of notes rising from the deep bass. There follow a depiction of the Irish harp of life, which is supposed to extend from above heaven to beneath hell; a raucous sound portrait of repetitive neon advertising in Times Square; a delicate and ethereal “Aeolian Harp” in which the strings are gently stroked; an “Anger Dance” that Cowell thought up when a doctor advised to have his leg cut off; and a dozen more pieces, none any less surprising or adventurous. All the music was written in the teens and twenties; it sounds a good deal less shocking today but is no less pioneering, genuinely provocative, and entertaining.

VIDEOS

Moral Suasion

This film, made for the War Department in 1942, doesn’t teach history so much as give an unsettling sense of the terror of the time when it was made. Imagine you are a raw recruit sitting in the dark on the eve of service. The government will make its case against the enemy during these few hours. Why We Fight may seem bombastic and crude fifty years later, but it also very effectively fulfills the assignment given to Frank Capra, whose public-spirited Hollywood features then included Meet John Doe and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. “Why are we Americans on the march?” the first part, “Prelude to War,” begins. “Could it be Pearl Harbor?” (explosion) “Britain?” (droning planes and bombs) “Norway?” (explosion) “Poland?” (explosion). Capra shows two globes, one free and one enslaved. Books go spinning into German bonfires; a Japanese dagger sinks into Manchuria. The second part, “Divide and Conquer,” while no less bellicose, uses more newsreel footage and fewer corny props, offering a brief refresher course in Hitler’s early tactics. Our Russian allies look positively heroic, and the film’s final segment, “War Comes to America,” brings the message thumping home. Capra’s film generates both heat and light in sketching out the battle against the “three gangsters.”

New York Underground

River of Steel is an engaging, concise film “about how the New York City subway system was built, and how it came to redefine the very meaning of urban scale.” That’s a lot of ground to cover in less than half an hour, and the latter issue is just touched on rather than fully investigated. But the filmmakers make their point: Modern New York simply would not have been possible without its subways.

Entrepreneurs began work on primitive systems in the 1870s, and there were several false starts. Finally in 1900 the former mayor Abram S. Hewitt set up the successful Interborough Rapid Transit Company. The ensuing construction was an immense undertaking, as the movie makes clear. The IRT and its eight thousand workers had to deal with “strikes, lawsuits, cave-ins, even quicksand.” The first line was completed in 1904, and on opening day, 110,000 people rode it. One early passenger must have had a movie camera, for River of Steel treats us to a marvelous engine’s-eye view from an early train as it shudders through a tunnel and out over the Brooklyn Bridge.

The film concludes with a quick discussion of the subway’s expansion into the outer boroughs, citing its effect on the crowds at Coney Island: before the subway about a hundred thousand people gathered there on a typical Sunday; afterward the number swelled to nearly a million. Like those early trains themselves, this film moves along at a fast clip, but it’s a swell ride.

Small Town America

David Plowden, who is a historian as well as a photographer as good as any we have, has spent much of his career recording the passing from our scene of the heroic age of the Industrial Revolution: steam locomotives, steamships, steel as it was made when Andrew Carnegie was making it. In Small Town America, however, he has found his subject in the modest back rooms and side streets that make up so much of the texture of our lives—and which are also going the way of the 4-4-0 and the lake steamer. The 111 photographs in this handsome and melancholy volume document with cool poetry a vernacular world of small post office lobbies, Spartan hotel rooms, the stage of a Wisconsin opera house with the curtain crowded with painted advertisements for local businesses (“Paquette’s Barber Shop: Hair Bobbing Our Specialty”), a handsome stained-glass passenger engine set in a Minnesota church window, “The gift of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers of the W. & St. P. R.R.” In aggregate, these intimate, well-worn vistas have a considerable emotional power, reflecting as they do a wholly familiar world that will have ceased to exist by the time our children are grown. The British poet Alfred Noyes said in his poem about a barrel organ, “the music’s not immortal, but the world has made it sweet.” There is nothing grand or gorgeous to be found in this book, but the workaday world it memorializes is sweet indeed.