Cyril Freezer. Model Railways on a Budget (1987)

     Cyril Freezer. Model Railways on a Budget (1987) Pre-DCC, pre-NEM standards, pre- high quality plastic molding, and it shows. But Freezer writes a nice breezy style, addressing (his younger) readers directly, and dispensing many useful hints. The hints still have value, despite our high tech models, and his advice about how to figure out the budget applies to many more departments than model railways.
     This is the second time I’ve read this book in less than a year.  It’s as fresh the second time round as the first time. I must have read it when I bought it in September 1987, but I can’t recall. I’m at the age where books I read years or decades ago are easier to recall than books read this week. **½ (2007)

Bill Watterson. Four Calvin & Hobbes collections

     Bill Watterson. Four Calvin & Hobbes collections. Calvin, the real version of Dennis the menace, and Hobbes, his stuffed toy tiger, are no longer with us. Watterson gave up drawing the strip some years ago, and all we have now are these splendid collections, and more recent ones with the Sunday panels in colour. They repay repeated reading, with Hobbes’ wisdom contrasting with and complementing Calvin’s innocent mischief. Calvin’s only moments of evil occur when he is trying to get the better of Susy Perkins, his neighbour and classmate, who thinks him to be the weirdest kid she knows. But she likes Hobbes, so she can’t quite hate Calvin.
     Calvin embodies pure boy, Hobbes is his imaginary playmate. The strip is a mix of Calvin’s real and imagined adventures. He hates school, and goes to great lengths to avoid homework. Yet his imagination shows that he’s no dummy. Hobbes expresses what Calvin presumably knows to be the better, more mature, more realistic attitudes and insights, but he is also pure jungle cat, just a whiff and a whisker away from real teeth and real claws and a real appetite for juicy little boys. Calvin’s alter egos, Spaceman Spiff and Stupendous Man, are his escape from realities he doesn’t like. His imagined embodiments as a tyrannosaurus that eats and crushes his enemies give him some solace. The line between fantasy and reality is a thin one. The veil that separates the inner and outer worlds tears often. Calvin knows when he is fantasising, but he also wishes that his fantasies were real. And sometimes they come too close to reality for comfort.
      The strip’s charm arises from this mix of reality and fantasy, maturity and childishness, acceptance of what is and escapes into imagined worlds where little boys are heroes that fight for justice or prehistoric lizards exacting vengeance. The effects range from mild amusement through wry sadness and to spluttering, gasping hilarity.
Many comic strips merely illustrate the text. Watterson’s drawings and text merge perfectly. In fact, the drawings often expand and extend the text’s meanings. I like his work a lot. **** (2007)

Olek crochets a cover for a locomotive

Olek is an artist that crochets covers for miscellaneous objects, some of which are other art works. Here's her latest: Polish locomotive I like her attitude.

Update 2025-06-21: The link no longer has images, but it's still worth reading for the story. Here's an image I found online:

Frank Ellison. Frank Ellison on Model Railroads (1954)

     Frank Ellison. Frank Ellison on Model Railroads (1954) This is the first model railway book I ever bought. It cost me 35 cents, or about 1½ hours babysitting money. I read it to pieces, and sometime in the 1970s rebound the book with cardboard covers and vinyl tape. The vinyl tape cracked when I opened the book a couple weeks ago, so I took the covers off, and decided to reread it before repairing the book.

     Frank Ellison emphasised operation “in a railroad like manner” when most people were still content to build models and run them round an oval a few times. Back then, building a layout, the locomotives, and the cars took so much time and effort that there wasn’t much energy left for actually operating the pike. Ellison set out to change that. His series of articles in Model Railroader, suitably edited, make up this book. About half the book deals with operation: the peddler freight, the through freight, passenger trains, engine changes, and so on. He reminds the reader that even a small layout with a few spurs can host a peddler freight and provide hours of entertainment.
     He believes scenery is essential as a backdrop or stage setting for the actors in the drama of railroading (he was a scene designer, builder, and setter by trade).  Thus, scenery, and how to design it to fool the viewer into believing the train is passing through miles of country, occupies most of the second half of the book. He spends less time on building models and adapting locomotives. With his theatrical background, he thinks of rolling stock as merely actors; it’s the roles they play that matter, and a good actor can play any role. Prototype fidelity matters less to him than the overall impression and reliable functioning.
     Ellison’s style is direct and clear. He is chatting with the reader, not pontificating. His casual assumption that model railroading is a man’s game jars nowadays, especially since so many women have declared themselves to be part of the hobby. He also assumes he’s talking to people who can afford to spend a fair bit of cash on their pastimes, which means he also assumes at least a high school education.  His materials and processes are dated, in fact many are impossible these days, since they have been replaced with plastics and electronics. But other than that, his points are as valid today as they were back then. He’s one of the pioneers of the hobby, one of the people who recognised early on that there was more to it than the craft of making miniatures. His influence is still with us. *** (2007)

Sue Grafton. C is for Corpse (1986)

     Sue Grafton. C is for Corpse (1986) Kinsey meets a brain-damaged young man, who believes he was run off the road in an attempt to kill him. He thinks he knows something that may make him a target. Kinsey agrees to investigate, but before she can get started, he dies, apparently of a brain hemorrhage. Kinsey has his $1000 retainer, and refuses to give up. She does find the killer. The corpse of the title conceals a murder weapon. As usual, Kinsey faces deadly danger in the denouement, and once again suffers injury. But the killer, a pathologist, will pay for his dastardly deeds.
     This outing moves as swiftly as the other books in the series, but the plotting feels a little stale. There’s a subplot involving Kinsey’s handsome but 80-year-old landlord, Elmer, and a 60-something gold-digging hustler who wants to take him for all he’s got. Kinsey manages to prevent that, too. The dialogue moves the story briskly and reveals character, but the whole piece feels too formulaic to be truly satisfying. That doesn’t make me any less a fan, though. ** (2007)

Norma Farnes, ed. The Compulsive Spike Milligan (2005)

     Norma Farnes, ed. The Compulsive Spike Milligan (2005) Excerpts from Milligan’s war memoirs, poetry, novels, and drawings. Most were selected by Milligan himself, or selected by Farnes as among his favourites.
     The overall effect is that of melancholy. The war did for Milligan; he never overcame its effects. Nonsense was his refuge, but a fragile one: working on The Goon Show triggered bouts of depression. Milligan’s friend Harry Secombe was able to find comfort in a Christian faith towards the end of his life. Milligan hated the Church for its complicity in too many evils of the world. And he could never sustain a normal mood or tone in his writing: any hint of sentimentality was ruthlessly converted in nonsense,  usually bizarre, sometimes surreally cruel. If ever a clown used his gifts to prevent himself from going crazy, Milligan did. That he failed intermittently only testifies to the depth of his horror at the human condition. He had many friends, which must have been a comfort to him.
     One Goon Show script is included, “The Battered Pudding Hurler of Bexhill-on-Sea”. Farnes says it’s one her favourites. It’s one of the best, perfectly plotted, and with nary a falter in the tone of surreal logic. *** (2007)

Faye Kellerman. Sacred and Profane (1987)

     Faye Kellerman. Sacred and Profane (1987) This appears to be the second in the Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series. On a camping holiday with Rina’s two sons, the elder finds bones. Decker eventually uncovers a sleazy alliance of respectable citizens and makers of snuff films, and has the satisfaction of seeing some of them brought down. But along the way a teenage hooker who has fed Decker needed information is murdered by a pedophile john; a couple of suspects come to a bad end; and Decker almost loses Rina.
     Kellerman writes in the Hammett tradition, adding her own angle on the private life of her hero, who is perhaps too deeply affected by the evil he must fight. Decker’s studies in Jewish religion are well done, his moral and emotional conflicts with Rina sound true, as does the mix of cynicism and pain in his colleagues and himself. On the strength of this book I bought another one, Sanctuary, well along in the series. I think I’ll have a hard time collecting them all, if I decide I want to do that after reading that one. **½ (2007)

Sue Grafton. B is for Burglar (1985)

     Sue Grafton. Sue B is for Burglar (1985) I’ve been collecting the Kinsey Milhone tales for some time, after reading A is for Alibi, and J is for Judgment. Then I decided I would read them in order, so here goes.
     This time out, just two weeks after her first recorded adventure, Milhone is drawn into a missing person search that turns into a murder inquiry. A wife (psychopath) and her husband (obsessed by her) have murdered a friend with loadsadough, but made it seem the wife herself was done in by a burglar. Except that there’s no obvious motive, no clues, etc. Only the accident that the executor of a will needs a signature from a missing woman starts the unravelling of the case. Milhone is as obsessive as expected, but we don’t get much deepening of her character. On the other hand, a few unfinished plot lines in her personal life suggest To Be Continued in subsequent volumes.
     The writing is competent as ever (Grafton thinks in scenes), with believable dialogue and just enough quirkiness in the secondary characters to bring them to life as a competent character actor would. Occasionally, Grafton indulges in description of landscape and weather, and does so well enough that I suspect an unsatisfied urge to write more literary tales. **½ (2007)

Dorothy Sayers. Starkes Gift (tr. 1999)

     Dorothy Sayers. Starkes Gift (tr. 1999) A good translation of the story in which Wimsey first meets and falls in love with Harriet Vane. She stands accused of poisoning Philip Boyes, her erstwhile lover, with whom she broke up when he offered her marriage after having persuaded her, a vicar’s daughter, to live with him for several months. Wimsey finds out that Boyle’s cousin Norman Urquhart had been shortchanged in an aged relative’s will, which provides a motive; and then puzzles out the method, which involves arsenic eating.
     The beginnings of the love affair between Wimsey and Harriet is nicely handled. I don’t think Sayers knew exactly where to go with it, but she did not want Harriet to marry Peter out of gratitude, nor did she want Peter to accept Harriet’s offer of concubinage as any kind of payment for services rendered. By this time Wimsey had already morphed into a much more scholarly gentleman, with a sound grasp of moral philosophy, hence his admiration for Harriet’s refusal to marry the man who had seduced her. Her refusal of his offer of marriage is equally sound, so he does not pressure her, nor does he take up her offer to live with him, a good portent. But it does set Sayers an almost insoluble problem. If these two, destined for each other, are ever to marry, they must do so as equals, which they may be intellectually and before the law, but not morally, since there now exists an obligation between them. It will be Sayers’ task to remove that obligation, which she manages to do in Gaudy Night, but not without a deal more anguish than even fictional characters should have to endure.
Wimsey nags his good friend Insp. Charles Parker into marrying his sister Mary. Parker thinks he isn’t good enough to marry an Hon., an attitude that the Duke and Duchess of Denver approve of, but the Dowager Duchess does not. Sayers doesn’t show us Parker’s and Mary’s courting or married life, even though there is more than a hint that they were intended as a foil to  Pater and Harriet. Authors can be seduced by their creations, too.
     I like Sayers’ books, and have read several of them more than once. This German version is better than Keines Natürlichen Todes, perhaps because the style is less slangy. Slang is always a problem: what one culture finds worthy of slang another either ignores or can speak of only in hushed tones. Slang also dates quickly, so that it is difficult to recapture the intended tone when translating the text a couple of generations later. **½ for the translation. (2007)

Burger & Starbird. Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz (2005)

     Burger & Starbird. Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz (2005) The authors are profs, so the professorial tone and terrible puns should be no surprise. All in all, a nicely done tour of those parts of modern math that seem to the authors either most relevant to Real Life, or most interesting. They believe that math is fun, stimulates the imagination, and stretches one’s worldview. Correct on all counts. Recommended to mathophobes. **½ (2007)

Mike Bryant. The Ian Allan Book of Model Railways (1960)

     Mike Bryant. The Ian Allan Book of Model Railways (1960) Bryant writes in a chatty style clearly aimed at the younger modeller, whom he assumes to be a boy in middle school, or perhaps younger, with help from dad. He begins with references to adults, but quickly drops that. He produces a reasonable survey of model railway practice of the 1960s, with emphasis on the use of proprietary equipment. Here and there he gives clear enough instructions on scratch-building a few items, such as a country station, using card and printed brick sheet. The book would have been a good first book for a young modeller. Now, it gives us a glimpse of the way it was 50 years ago. Advertising litters the book, and no doubt made it profitable. Ian Allan also published several modelling magazines, and published books like this one as much to build his subscriber base as to help the readers. The photographs are small, and suffer from the limited technology of the time.** (2007)

Tony Koester. Realistic Model Railroad Design (2004)

     Tony Koester. Realistic Model Railroad Design (2004) Koester looks at just about everything. Since a lot of people freelance, he spends some time considering questions of believable graphics, logos, and such. He covers scenery, rosters, adaptation of prototype practices, and so on. The book is overwritten, partly because Koester tends to use three words where two will do, and partly because he belabours the obvious. He does help the reader consider the overall effect of the layout, and how various components and aspects contribute to or detract from it. In that sense, it’s a worthwhile book. ** (2007)