The other day I picked up The Pullman Porters and West Oakland, Images of America (Arcadia Publishing) by Thomas and Wilma Tramble in Seashore Trolley Museum's Gift Shop. I have bought other Arcadia Publishing books on railroad related topics at other railway museum bookstores and I found factual errors in those books. This book is far worse. And it is not a book about Pullman Porters, but about the development of the community of West Oakland, Calif.

Arcadia Publishing has over three thousand titles in its Images of America series. Each book has exactly 128 pages with over 200 black and white photographs. The price of each book is $19.99.

Let me give you a perspective on Arcadia Publishing from the article "Arcadian Visions of the Past" by Mark Rice, Columbia Journal of American Studies, Volume 9, (Fall 2009). Mark Rice is Chair of the Department of American Studies at St. John Fisher College. He wrote "Arcadia Publishing does not fact-check the books it publishes, nor does it engage in an external peer-review process, as is done with scholarly history books." In short, the authors are solely responsible for contents of the book.

The many factual errors I found in previous Arcadia books I bought had to do with railroad technology and operations. The author, not being close to the railroad industry, made an incorrect assumption/observation. It bothered me that the author could also be presenting false information on areas I knew nothing about, such as the local history of a town through which a railroad was building.

Rice gives examples where authors who don't even know where a photograph came from, or who the people in it are, make up captions to suit their story line. I'll give examples about porters. But let me first give you a short review of <i>The Pullman Porters and West Oakland</i> by Goodreads' reviewer Sheehan:

"Again with the title misnomers...This book should have been called pictures of Oakland locals who submitted and/or had their images archive in the African-American Museum of Oakland collection.

"I'm not hating on the book, it was a nice historical record of West Oakland's black roots, but the captions were lacking much historical content/context, the pictures sort of a tossed together hodge-podge; and worst of all, the only passable portrayal of Pullman Porters were about 10 paragraphs of texts, and twice that many photos, many of which I had (sadly) seen before in other books on the subject."

Many of the pictures the authors caption as being porters suredon't look like porters to me. Here's three. (Note, I simply photographed the pictures in the book and the quality is not as good as the book's images.) The photographs in the Arcadia books I have seen are quite satisfactory given the book's price and generally quite interesting and informative. (Note only three attachments are allowed in this forum, thus I will put more in a reply below.)

Here are two more pictures.


The caption to this next one is, "Here an unidentified chef poses with second cooks in the galley. Among other things, the porters were expected to be health inspectors. Fingernails had to be clean, no sideburns or mustaches were allowed, and no torn or soiled jackets were permitted."

Yes there are correctly captioned pictures of porters and unfortunately more incorrectly captioned pictures.

So how should books for our bookstores be screened? I doubt many visitors here in Kennebunkport, Maine really want to purchase a book on the development of West Oakland, Calif. I didn't even though I lived in Oakland 15 years. And more importantly, how do we make sure publishers tell the history of railroads accurately. Rice said it well when he concluded, "... the "Images of America" books may, in fact, erase the past as much as they illuminate it."

pile up your notes of incorrectness and shoot them off to the publisher.

The Nickel Plate Story by John Rehor is a very good book, but I hear there are areas of problem info, I have heard all kinds of arguements about these issues, you can't go back and talk to the author, he's long gone.

Your better to see if a correction issue can be published for such books.
Rehor did a great job, despite little this or thats, its more work than I did, so find the corrections and fixem if possible.

Arcadia has proven themselves to be effectively a "vanity press" with a nice marketing force behind it. Write a book for them with a PRR or Santa Fe content, and you're all but guaranteed 5,000 sales no matter how lousy the content. Write a book you can sell cheap in your gift shop or to the locals, and you can easily triple that or more.

Arcadia approached me a few years back to do a book for them, apparently based on the apparent success of my previous two books on Washington D.C. and Baltimore "Then & Now" photography. I replied with questions about author payment, royalties, and the like, and the immediate response was along the lines of how I was apparently "not a good fit" for Arcadia.

Their business model is brilliant if you have a compilation of photos, old and new, of an especially esoteric subject AND a somewhat ready-made market locally for a book on same--say, the historic bridges or buildings of a county, a short line nobody's ever done a book on, or historic views of a community. But, unfortunately, many of the Arcadia books I've come across look like exactly what they are--formulaic to a fault, a collection of random old postcards or photos, and good luck with identifying the subjects. And the captions are only as good as the editor. I've been in the tough spot of having to poke someone who I counted as a friend and tell him the moral equivalent of "sorry, Bill, but that was the New York, CHICAGO & St. Louis, not the New York, Cincinnati & St. Louis, and I don't care what your grandmother told you...."

We run into this syndrome quite often, even with supposedly "authoritative" authors. I have a friend who tries in vain to have the Stephen Ambrose book Nothing Like It In the World removed from every library he crosses paths with. The factual errors the late Ambrose made with this book have been well-documented elsewhere:
http://utahrails.net/articles/ambrose.php

Now, we have a conundrum here. On the one hand, that Ambrose book is probably the ONLY railroad book far too many libraries have acquired in the past decade, primarily on the hype and publicity Ambrose and his publisher garnered through channels such as the New York Times, NPR, and the like. (We're now seeing similar placement and acquisition patterns for Conquering Gotham, after author Jill Jonnes garnered similar publicity through NPR, NY Times, etc.)

The trade-off seems to be that studious historians often tend to forget the important role of storytelling in the mission of getting the public interested in history (read one too many utterly dry papers from the R&LHS Bulletin or any county historical society from a half-century or more ago, and you'll get what I mean). Meanwhile, good story-tellers (and book-sellers) often tend not to let the facts get in the way of a good story. I tend to think we're obligated to find a good compromise between the two extremes.

I wonder if Arcadia would be interested in my review of the Fiddletown & Copperopolis.....

Well, its good (sad) to know that the one recent railroad book I have by Arcadia publishing isn't alone in being wrong. I REALLY don't mean to bad mouth this in anyway, the book is great, and if nothing else it is a great place for reference pictures, trouble is once you find a few errors, you question everything else. And i mean, there are errors, almost EVERYWHERE. It is stuff that someone with a small amount knowledge of the subject would go, "Wait, that's not right, that's not what that is". Thus it brings in to doubt all of the pictures and information related to the subjects that the person reading is not familiar with. It was rather sad to go through this book and in one section be able to list of blatant errors on almost every page. Some of which if they had just looked at the picture a little bit more they would've been able to not make that mistake in the first place.

These books are a great way to see old/hard to find pictures in a relatively cheap collection. However, past that, I unfortunately cant trust the words with them. And unfortunately, people who don't know anything read them and take them for truth, thus making that much harder to preserve the facts.

My little 1 cent rant.

If we're heaving brickbats at book publishers today, Arcadia certainly isn't the only target. I recently purchased a volume of photographs of anthracite region railroads from a popular railfan publisher. While the photos were indeed lovely -- all in color -- I was infuriated by the inaccurate information in the cutlines and the very poor registration of some views. Photo locations were misidentified, trains heading in one direction were said to be going the other way, and in one view, a station with its name clearly visible was identified as another location miles away! To make matters even worse, the book was allegedly "authored" by a well-known former resident of the region. This isn't the first book I've purchased from this particular publisher, but the ratio of errors to page was much higher than previous books. I was so angered after having spent $65 that I vented my spleen to a small group of fellow anthracite railfans, and I was astonished when one of them offered to purchase the volume from me for more than I paid for it. Needless to say, I took him up on his offer. I won't be spending any of my money on volumes from that publisher again, period!

I've reviewed several of their publications here, and found that the value in the books is much more about the images than the bit of text. My most recent....and probably the last since it was not very good and I said so......is still on the home page. That one really confused me - when good images are your forte, why publish a book full of lousy ones?

I agree about the lack of factual basis found in many of the captions, and have called it out on occasion as well. I think Arcadia isn't in the fact-checking business, and relies on the compilers (I'm not going to use the "author" word) of their submissions to know their subject, when it is obvious in many cases that they don't.

They are what they are - and taken from that perspective, the majority of their books do provide quality reproductions of high quality historic images with captions ranging from entire fantasy to reasonable authenticity tied together with short historically contextual two-page essays of about equally variable veracity.

Know what they are selling, and buy if it interests you. I think they fill a niche when they do it well, and shouldn't publish anything that fails the "quality images" test. Why devalue your own brand?

dave

The alternative is "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good/great".

Even some of the "greatest" writers and photographers have suffered from errors of memory, filing, data procurement, or judgement. Dig deep into the discourse of the R&LHS, the Lexington Group, etc., and there's a quiet set of musings about certain authors that have been proven to take occasionally serious liberty with the "facts." Such well-known and frequently-published authors/compilers as Lucius Beebe, Bert Pennypacker, O.S. Nock, Don Ball, and others have been shown at various times to have made mistakes (and, in a couple cases, apparently made things up out of whole cloth).

The alternative is "books written by committee." This is, in effect, what academic peer review is supposed to accomplish, and even the "authorities" can be questioned. I remember one time mentioning online that a particular PRR rail line was used to ship anthracite coal to Pittsburgh in the late 1800s and early 1900s; august higher-ups in the PRR historian community promptly denounced my statement as impossible. Never mind that I had diaries of a "railfan" of the era, who later worked for the PRR, who lived beside the line; never mind that said railfan had saved train orders and waybills to this effect; etc. "He must have made that up."

Somewhere in the PRRT&HS web presence I have seen "errata sheets" being circulated as "wiki documents" for the Roberts "PRR Triumph" series. Some PRR historians have serious issues with the series of books Barnard Roberts & Co. produced on the various regions of the PRR, and given the experiences I described in the above paragraphs I wouldn't know who to believe.

The other alternative is to just never publish anything lest an error creep in.

Right now several Baltimore-area railfans (myself included) are going through an utterly massive slide collection, compiled from the acquisition of at least three collections by a late railfan. I can pick up one stack of 20-25 slides, and I could pound together a photo essay for any rail magazine about, just to pick a random example, this 1972 visit to the Chiriqui Land Company railroad, a 3' gauge railway between Costa Rica and Panama which seemingly had no two locos alike (Whitcombs, Davenports, Vulcans, and GE mini-boxcabs!). That's 25 or so slides. The one drawer has 300 or so slides once I throw out out-of-focus or redundant beginning-of-the-photo-runby-with-the-loco-a-speck-in-the-distance shots. Three drawers per case. One guy has five cases. Another has four. I have one case. There are dozens more where those came from. Most of the slides are sorted into broad categories, but uncaptioned. We're doing major guessing games as to which photographer took what photos (the overseas stuff from the 1970s we assume is from one guy, the old copy slides from one city's historic photos were another guy, etc.). We can deduce a few specific excursions--a Reading T1 entering Gettysburg, Reading 1251 in York, Pa., or Hart's two CP Pacifics, for example--thanks to slide date stamping (not always there). We could put together several full weekends of "Name That Photo Location" slide shows, and we'd still have no guarantees of being right.

Would you rather we throw them all out rather than make a boo-boo in captioning?

As far as Arcadia Books are concerned, some are definitely better than others.

I prefer books that aim to tell a story, and then add pictures to support the text.

I've seen a lot of Arcadia (and other) books that do the opposite; they find a collection of photographs, and then build a story around them. The resulting work can overstate the importance of a certain railroad (or historical figure, or geographic location) simply because the photos of said railroad happen to be more plentiful. Likewise, other equally or even perhaps more significant railroads (or historical figures, or geographic locations) get shortchanged.

When I did the "Scranton Railroads" book, I tried to follow the first approach, which wasn't always easy. I was also constantly having to shorten text and captions to fit in Arcadia's parameters. My first draft totaled over 25,000 words. I had to whittle that down to 9500. That was the hardest part of the whole process. While the cookie cutter approach can be frustrating, without Arcadia, a lot of narrow focus subject matter would never see the light of day.

In the end, I was proud of the overall work, despite one embarrassing typo and one mislabeled photograph. Like anything else the end product is a direct result of the effort you put into it. Sometimes you get a book that's just plain crap from cover to cover. In that case, I'd leave it off the shelves.

I'll leave it up to others as to whether I succeeded in producing a decent overview on Scranton's railroads.

Dave

The First Amendment saves the day again, yes, you are allowed to publish books that are wrong. Of course your opponent can do the same, er, I mean: publish one that calls you out.

"Books written by committee" being wrong: Wikipedia

I know someone who has authored several Arcadia books, as well as other railroad books (anyone who knows where I am and groups I'm involved with could probably easily figure out of whom I speak). He has told me pretty much what was said here about the accuracy of Arcadia, but they are willing, and usually eager, to publish his work. He tries to be as careful as possible about fact-checking, and there are usually very few errors in his books for Arcadia.

I think you would also find more than a few errors in all of the Power series of books by the late Al Staufer. A serious B&O fan friend of mine came up with just about an entire single-spaced page of errata from B&O Power.

I was killing time at a library in my region while waiting for a meeting to start recently, and I decided to take a look at the transportation section of the collection, just to see what they had. Turned out to be very light on rail-related books, and most of them were on modeling, with nothing really recent. There was one Arcadia railroad book in the local history section of the library. I guess I never realized how lucky I was growing up that the main Akron Public Library had a decent collection of railroad books, including Rehor's Nickel Plate Story, and Great Little Railways of the World, and my local branch had a few gems, like The Long Trains Roll. Perhaps we might consider making occasional contributions of pertinent railroad titles to our local libraries, in addition to being careful as to what is sold in museum or tourist railroad gift shops.

As long as books are written by humans, they will contain errors, some more eggregious than others.

It has been inferred in the other posts, but many of these books, especially the "in color!" series are captioned/written by individuals who did not take the photographs. Therefore, one must put a lot of legwork and sometimes guesswork into figuring out location, approximate date, train direction, etc.

You really should divide history books/publications into three general categories: 1) Popular History (Arcadia, Ambrose, etc.); 2) Enthusiast History (The "In Color" Books, Classic Trains Magazine, Sauffer Books, CERA Bulletins, etc.); and 3) Academic History (Peer Reviewed Journals, John H. White, George Hilton, H. Roger Grant., etc.)

Acardia has a ready made market, for people possibly generally interested in local history. (Railroad bridges of Nelson County, KY for example). Because they are published more for their photo content than the text, errors are rife.

Enthusiast History can just be as rife with erros, as it's written by people who are also not trained in historical methods, don't do good fact checking, and often make unsupported assumptions. For example, in an enthusiast publication, an author concluded that the Mt. Vernon Car Co. probably built trolley cars, because their company baseball team was in the "Trolley League." The likely explaination is that Mt. Vernon, IL is fairly close to St. Louis, which had several rail car and trolley car builders, and the inter-company baseball league ws called the "Trolley League" as a result.

Academic history, is well, academic history. Produced usually in the publish or perish environment of mdoern academica, it seems that we are writing more and more about less and less these days. Also, given the ideological bent of many in the humanities, much of this stuff gets twisted through the lens of modern political belief. Unless you are H. Roger Grant, you probably couldn't write a history of the Chicago Great Western, you have to write about "Race Class and Gender in Grainger Railroading" or something like that. As a result, this stuff doesn't have much appeal outside the profession, with some good exceptions (John H. White, George Hilton's book on Interurbans, etc.)

In summation, if you are not prepared to sell a book with an error in it, don't sell a book. How much errors you allow, and what you think the public will buy is a business decision best left up to your organization's management.

While we're on the subject of errors, what about videos? I believe some videos for sale contain as many or more glaring errors than books.

For example, one video publisher bought some existing videos. On an ego trip he replaced the narration with his own voice. Not only was he a truly lousy voice-over reader, but his narration contained many errors. The original script had been very carefully fact checked.

No, but say the caption is a best guess and why.

Isn't this "throwing the baby out with the bath water", "beating a dead horse", or some other metaphor? You are correct to correct the error in the text, and this is not the worst place to do that (okay, there are better places), but if the book's main purpose is to provide substance in photographs, backed by text commentary, then it probably serves a purpose. An error concerning the role of the Pullman Porter or the rolls of the Dining car Chef, may require correction,but it doesn't negate the total value of the book. Museum shops can recommend books they think are substantive for research, but if they don't it's up to the buyer to decide what interests him or her.