Joints Out Of Time

Roger E. Kislingbury has spent a good deal of his adult life hanging out in bars—vanished ones. And now you can join him, through the 170-odd photographs in his very handsome book, Saloons, Bars, and Cigar Stores: Historical Interior Photographs (Waldo and VanWinkle Publishers, $65.00). For the author, a saloon is a “rustic wooden-floor barroom, usually in the West or a mining district, with oil lamps, primitive fixtures, and a back bar with a ‘diamond dust mirror,'” while a bar has “a more finished or refined appearance,” often with an ornate backbar gleaming under the owner’s pride, electric lights. There are plenty of both to be found here. These places were meant to offer comfort, and thanks to the big, crisply reproduced photographs in Kislingbury’s book, even 80 years after Prohibition worked its havoc on them, they still do. To order a copy, e-mail the publisher at waldovan@earthlink.net.