Earl Chapin May. Model Railroads in the Home (1939)

     Earl Chapin May. Model Railroads in the Home (1939) It’s difficult to decide what to make of this book. The title promises practical advice, but there is hardly any. What we get instead is an arch, wannabe-witty survey of the model railroading of the time, with names dropping right and left, and an unsubtle tone of invitation to join the inner circle of true devotees. Some of the history is interesting, and if combined with other sources would enable a more complete account of early model railroads than we now have. The plates are interesting, too, but the captions are inadequate, and there is no attempt whatsoever to explain what the plates depict.
     Of practical advice on what to do and how to do there is almost none. Of sycophantic fawning over the elite modellers that May has met there is much. I paid $2 for this book in October 1972, or about $10 in today’s money. Too much, even if considered as a curio. May seems to be heavily influenced by Alexander Woollcott and other “witty” writers of the Algonquin Round table group, who operated on the assumption that anything said wittily was worth writing down, no matter how irrelevant or devoid of substance. I gave up about half way through the book. Bomb (2008)