The WHITE RIVER Book List

Art, Vermont, landscape, photography, & other damn good books!

Hilary Page's Guide to Watercolor Paints This tour de force on watercolor paints contains more than a thousand swatches showing graded washes, blotting charactistics, wet-in-wet results, and gives the ASTM pigment names for an incredible number of colors from makers such as Winsor & Newton, Holbein, Da Vinci, Daniel Smith, and many, many others. It provides an increbible comparison tool and a good look into the paints used by artists. The indices are superb in that you can look up a basic industry pigment--say PY42--and find all the paints which use it. (It's a yellow, by the way.) You can also use the list ordered by makers, and find any color they make that is included in the book. I simply can't recommend this book enough for anyone interested in really finding out about the materials being used. She also really tests for lightfastness, and often what she finds does not agree with the manufacturers stated degree of lightfastness. There is a brief history of the pigment industry at the beginning, but the meat of the book is page after page of color swatches, organzied, as you might expect, by the colors.

The Old Straight Track A splendid book by one of those enticingly thoughtful British amateurs. In this country we ignore such folk, even poke fun at them, certainly never take them seriously. But, much has been accomplished by such curious people. Alfred Watkins is a prime example of this breed, and this book thinks about ancient travelers in Britain, how they moved from place to place, considers place names skuch as "Cole", "Dod", "Black", and of course deals extensively with the use of the grand maps of the British Ordinance Survey. Watkins took many photographs to illustrate his theory and, beyond serving his purpose, they are incredibly beautiful images. I bought a real compass after reading this book. Unfortunately, only used copies are available. But thankfully, they are plenty.

The New View over Atlantis A quirky read about many things of interest to anyone curious about ancient thought and customs. Some parts are a bit far-fetched, but never without charm and interest. The Nazca Lines, Watkins' ley lines, ancient astronomers, the pyramids--a nicely written compendium of stuff we don't much think about anymore, but perhaps should. It's good to wonder about what came long before us. It is profusely illustrated and I'm sure will spark at least one or two synapses for you if you have any interest at all in maps, ancient history, the stars, or very old religions.

Walker Evans, a collection of photographs published in a small, very elegant, and thankfully, very affordable package. Thames and Hudson has struck gold with this format. The book feels good, looks good, and provides an excellent cross section of Evans' work. Most here are urban scenes, including a few of his signs. But for those, there's another book (see next in this list.)

Walker Evans: Signs delighted both the photographer and typographer in my soul. Unfortunately the chosen writer for the text was Andrei Codrescu; as usual too much of the writer and his too often over-the-top metaphors. And, also unfortunately, the book's designer seems to have been ignorant of the effects of line spacing on readability. As a typographer, I like the typeface, but not for the use it's put too here. Great for the big stuff, hell to read in text size. BUT, then we don't buy a book like this for the copy; we buy it for the images. And, it's a superb collection published by the J. Paul Getty Museum. It's printed by Vermont's sadly now-defunct Stinehour Press.

Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, by Philip Ball, 2001, is a must read and I do not use that term often as I hate it when people say it to me. It's well-written, enchanting in fact, also erudite, with fine plates, and a great index. If you are an artist, an eclectic, a student of human history, fascinated with light, or just plain curious, this book will give you great pleasure and more knowlege about color than you will ever need, but about which we ought, indeed, to know a great deal.

Evocations of Place: The Photography of Edwin Smith is a gem of a find for me and my photography history bent, but also for general landscape work. Smith was man whose themes were: "...a concern for the fragility of the environment; an acute appreciation of the need to combat cultural standardization by safeguarding regional diversity; and a conviction that architecture should be rooted in time and place." He was British, but his concerns are, as we know today in Vermont, universal. Clean off your coffee table for this one. By Robert Elwall, 2007.

Hands on the Land: A History of the Vermont Landscape, by Jan Albers, 2000, is a mine of pictures, engraving, maps of Vermont, all included in the service of a deep look at the Vermont landscape. It's no dreamy flatlander publication; it's published by Vermonters FOR Vermonters (an Orton Family Foundation book). Make more room on your coffee table! Chapter 5 (Choosing Vermont, 1945 to the Present) is for anyone who cares about the future of Vermont.

Abandoned New England, by Priscilla Patton, 2007.
This was, I think, the second book I got after I became an AOA finalist. It's a look at, as its subtitle says, Landscape in the Works of Homer, Frost, Hopper, Wyeth, and Bishop. Again, it has an excellent bibliography, and the writing is especially good for a book that is clearly out of academia.

Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England (Revisting New England), by Christopher J. Lenney, 2003, is a delightful, if quirky book. It's where I found the fascinating information about New England graveyards and gravestones. The chapter list tells you a lot about the kind of info here: Placenames, Boundaries, Roads, Houses, Gravestones.

A Certain Slant of Light, by William F. Robinson, 1980, is a wonderful history of New England photography as it spread out from Boston. It was in New England that the idea of landscape photography really came into its own. Unfortunately, no longer in print so you will have to Google it and find it used.

Abandoned New England: Its Hidden Ruins and Where to Find Them , 1976, is another William Robinson book, filled with maps, engravings and photographs of such places as the town pound, tanneries, mills, factories and the like. Not a lot of Vermont content, but a great bibliography.

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald is a rare find. A slow, rich read that wanders, in quintessential conversational style, the map of Europe and a map of memories. So abundant is this book in associations, stories, connections, that the marvelous photographer, Dana Mueller paid homage to Sebald with a suite of images. There are occasional images scattered throughout the book, interestingly without captions.

List Last Updated on 14 FEB 09.