Two oddities

     Brock Silversides. Prairie Sentinels (1997) Historical photos and a diagram of the innards complement the brief but surprisingly thorough history of the elevator in western Canada. Well done. **½

     The Railway Correspondence and Travel Society. The Locomotives of the Great Western Railway: Part Eleven: The Rail Motor vehicles and Internal Combustion Locomotives. (1956) Just what the obsessively descriptive title says, and obsessively complete and detailed. Useful as a reference, but its discursive style and arrangement makes it a difficult to find exactly the information desired. A few more tables would help, as would an index. Good photos. I bought this from a stall at the Gloucester & Warwickshire Railway at Toddington for £5. Its original price was £1, which would amount to about £10 in today’s money, so I got a bargain. **½  (2008)

Michael Pitts, Footprints Through Avebury (1992)

     Michael Pitts, Footprints Through Avebury (1992) This is one of those thorough and beautifully organised and illustrated guide books that the British do so well. I have found no others like it anywhere in the world. This one takes the reader/walker on a series of walks in and around Avebury, noting everything worth seeing (at least to someone – tastes will differ), and providing brief histories of them all. The walks range in length from a few hundred metres to a few kilometres in length. The sights range in age from several thousand years to a few decades. Not the kind of book one reads just for fun, unless one has an obsessive interest in pre-historic Britain; but one that one would re-read after one’s visit as a reminder of the pleasures of seeing what there is to see. As Yogi Berra said, You can learn a lot by just looking; and one can learn a lot more when one has a friendly, lucid guide such as this booklet. **** (2003)