Railroad museum bookstores should not stock badly written railroad books. The public expects the bookstore staff to do their homework on this.

The Pullman Porters and West Oakland is the absolute worst Arcadia book I've ever encountered. They should be ashamed of this piece of dreck, especially in C.L.Dellum's hometown of Oakland. (C.L. Dellums was elected vice president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1929, and became president in 1966: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._L._Dellums) I was given a copy by a well-meaning friend. I was appalled at the writer's lack of basic railroad knowledge, inaccurate and/or useless captions, use of grainy stock publicity photos that have been published umpteen times before, and inclusion of family album snapshots that just don't belong in this book.

Those Pullman Blues by David D. Perata (Madison Books, 1999) is a superb history, with many tell-it-like-it-really-was (i.e. "non-sanitized") interviews. Many of the porters and dining car waiters interviewed worked out of West Oakland S.P. passenger yard. This is what railroad bookstores should stock. It may be out of print (??), but new and used copies are readily available $8 and up on http://www.abebooks.com and http://www.amazon.com.

- Doug Debs

You are all avoiding the point. We work hard to make every artifact, display, ride, docent dialog, etc., historically accurate. Yet we sell books like discussed in this thread in our book stores. Books often with gross historical errors. Why are we so lax? How do we change?

I happen to be at the Seashore Trolley museum this summer so I checked out the book store. It has a major display of Arcadia Publishing books -- about 80 titles. I noted a couple of streetcar books authored by streetcar museums and bet they are accurate. The erroneous book on Pullman Porters with which I started this thread is still there.

How do we prevent this? How do we keep our wonderful fetish with historical accuracy operating in our bookstores? Why do we sell historical garbage?

Hey, what's in your bookstore?

Have a good weekend.

You get what you pay for.

Arcadia doesn't pay. That means you have to find someone willing to volunteer their editing and writing talents, and maybe their photo/postcard/slide collection--a collection that may represent an investment of thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars' worth of money, time, and/or work.

Writing well and compiling an accurate yet readable history is work and talent, just like the the guys that can effortlessly reproduce a wooden or metal part in the shop. The proverbial "any idiot" can sweep the floor or write a bunch of random captions for miscellaneous photos, but you limit access to the website, machine shop, or PR writing to those with demonstrable skills.

Do you just want a quickie souvenir to sell in the gift shop? Crank out an Arcadia book. Do you want a better, more authoritative history of your line, operation, locos, etc.? If what you have in mind can fit an Arcadia template and you have someone willing to volunteer the effort, go for it. If you want a better product, work harder, self-publish, and/or ally with a hobby publisher, and get someone (possibly an outsider) to edit and/or lay out a more attractive product.

Writing railroad history books is not exactly the Path to Instant Wealth. Most well-respected authors do so with no expectation of significant financial benefit.

Arcadia has published some excellent books, well researched and as well laid out as their minimal-text-allowed requirements permit. Local San Francisco Bay Area examples include Railroads of Los Gatos by Ed Kelley & Peggy Conaway (highly recommended, a real keeper), and Niles Canyon Railways by Henry Luna and the Pacific Locomotive Association. These Arcadia books retail for $19.99, which is far more affordable and sellable (to the general public) than most U.S. railroad history publications.

Too many USA railroad history books are large-format, with increasingly larger fonts. Large format is wonderful for the rare book with razor-sharp large-format photos, such as Southern Pacific Steam Pictorial, Vol. I & II by Dunscomb, Dunscomb, & Pecotich. But I've seen far too many large-format expensive RR history books which didn't make good use of the large pages. British & European RR history publications tend to have much smaller text, densely packed, with numerous diagrams, small but very sharp photos, and highly informative captions. Their standards of historical accuracy and research appear to be very high indeed. These books are usually published in smaller formats than typically used in the USA. Net result is a lot more information is packed into a more affordable book.

- Doug Debs

And stocking up the museum gift shop with the $65 range books can be a risky proposition. You may get stuck with inventory. Local hobby shop dealers tell me that the sales of books in this range have dropped off badly, people just don't want to spend that much any more, particularly when some subjects have been "hit" a half dozen times with little improvement in coverage. The situation with some of the publishers favoring their mass distribution outlets that are dumping the books on eBay has not helped the retail sellers. Some publishers products are appearing there at 60% and greater discounts only a few months after they appeared in the hobby shops and museum stores at full list price.

This is one of several very interesting discussions of publications going on right now at various sites and organizations. Many of them deal with members wanting to see more information and more subjects published, while the publications staff note that the supply of articles is declining. So good luck on trying to motivate your members to write books.

PC

I recently visited the Princeton Railroad Museum (Princeton, WV)...on the old Virginian Railway. Was looking to buy a book on the Virginian, and know that a few have been produced. Alas, all they had for sale was an Arcadia Publishing book on the road. I asked the person behind the counter if it was any good. She said straight out..."Well, there's a few glaring errors that make it pretty lousy"...

Not the best way to sell books, but the truth was worth the laugh. I bought one for the heck of it, and not knowing the history of the Virginian, I would never be able to pick up their errors.

Arcadia is just there to make the buck. They have people who specialize in local history (states, regions, subjects), who have quotas on how many they need to produce in that publication season. Take it for what it's worth. There's plenty of good books written out there on subjects, by historians and other students of railroad history. I just like them for the photos.

I've been reading this thread with interest. I've got to toss my thoughts in.

First, with all due respect to Alexander...Arcadia does pay, twice a year to be exact. They pay in the neighborhood of 10% of the wholesale price, which seems to be fairly standard for publishers (based on my limited experience). In the case of a $19.99 book comes out to just under a dollar per copy. Nobody's going to get rich off it...but, that being said, if your local museum/organization puts together an Arcadia book and then sells it in your gift shop, they can make six or seven bucks a copy for each one sold. That's where the money is, to be exact. When the book itself is retailing for $20, there really isn't much there to cover the publisher's cost, much less the author.

I will preface my remaining comments by throwing out there first that I have written a book for Arcadia, specifically Rails Around McCloud (published January 2008), and I supplied a good amount of photo material for another, their volume on the Yreka Western. I've got almost universal positive feedback on my book. I enjoyed putting it together, and I'm overall pleased with the finished product. It has sold relatively well, and I've recovered all of my direct costs in putting the book together and then some. I worked with a guy at the time my book came out who had several books to his name, and he was very impressed with the paper weight, image reproduction, and binding on my book when he saw it.

That being said, any Arcadia book is only ever going to be as good as the author. As noted, Arcadia relies entirely on the author- they will edit for their house style and make sure you are following their formatting guidelines, but beyond that the author is on their own. They don't want to be publishing garbage books, but at the same time they are not staffed to double check facts. They prefer working with local authors, preferably museums and historical societies or those with demonstrated interests and connections to the area- and their acquisition editors do go hunting specifically for potential authors of a subject they are interested in publishing- my McCloud book came along because they saw and liked by McCloud Rails website (http://www.trainweb.org/mccloudrails) and asked me if I would be interested. Beyond that, Arcadia gives you their formatting requirements and turns you loose, and what you give them is generally what they will publish. Which is why you get quality all over the board from their products- some are going to pull together a cohesive story, others are going to find 220 random photos and throw them together with little order or rationale. There are also no real safeguards to prevent an author from inserting their own views or beliefs into the books, as appears to have happened with the Pullman (Oakland) book that kicked this thread off.

Arcadia books are not meant to be serious history books. They are meant above and beyond all else to be picture books. Another publisher I talked with that has since exited the book publishing world told me once that, for all intents and purposes, very few people who buy a serious history book will ever sit down and actually read the whole thing. I'm surrounded as I type this with several hundred hard bound volumes on western railroad and logging history, and I have actually read only a handful of them from cover to cover. And I will probably, in all likelihood, never read through more than a few more. I flip through them, some of them quite often, but then mostly to look at the pretty pictures and maybe read a caption or two. This is where Arcadia is, in my mind, very smart- I've said for a while that what they really do is publish history for the unwashed masses, those who will like the pictures but may or may not read the text. And their books are priced right as well, low enough that they fall into the impulse purchase category for most people. I may think long and hard about dropping $80 or more for a serious book, but won't put that much thought into an Arcadia product. That is the beauty of what they do.

I will also say that I've been impressed with their marketing and other support efforts. When Rails Around McCloud came out, they had a salesman in the McCloud/Cunsmuir/Mt. Shasta City region who spent three or four days pitching the book to all the local retailers, and they have provided mountains of promotional materials (flyers, posters, etc).

To bring this back to the original question...I think the real answer comes down to what are the goals and aims of your organization? We get involved in railroad history and railroad preservation because of a strong interest in the subject, to which is added a great deal of knowledge. And this knowledge, by and large, has a very limited audience. Start talking to a couple random people about trains and you are highly likely to put them to sleep. Quickly. Throw an Arcadia book in front of them showing what the area looked like a century ago, they may have more interest, but probably not much more than a passing interest.

I've been reading increasing thoughts that the rail preservation industry is in all reality in the entertainment business first. That's how you compete for the family dollars that, like it or not, are the source of preservation income. To that end, here's an observation- this past summer, my daughter and I rode five tourist railroads in the pacific northwest in the span of a week. All five had gift shops of one kind or another. Two of them were very small and minimally stocked, a few hats and shirts and not much else. Only two sold books, and both had very limited selections. The one factor that was constant across four of the five gift shops was the prevalence of what I would charitably call railroad crap, the kind of generic stuff that grownups give children who have an interest in trains. No real connections to the ride, or the history, or anything else the kid experienced that day other than it was a choo-choo. And, in the four gift shops that had that kind of material available, that's what I saw in the hands of most of the people headed towards the cash register.

I'd challenge you...take a long look at your gift shop, watch how people move through your shop, see what causes them to stop and look at something, see what kinds of things cause them to move on. What sells? What doesn't? Is the gift shop merely another way to separate tourists from tourist dollars to support the overall organization? Or is it a way to further the message and mission of the organization? If the latter, how do you accomplish this? Are you more likely to sell one copy of a well done, professionally edited $80 railroad book, or 80 train-shaped suckers at $1 each? Which of these two will actually provide more direct benefit to the organization? In the end, if you do have a historically inaccurate book on the shelves, how many people besides a select few will know that? I'm not trying to say it makes it right...but I think people are far more likely to buy a $20 book of mostly pictures riddled with errors than they will a $50 or more book on the same subject that has been researched to death and more professionally published. And, in the end, they are likely to actually read about the same amount of text out of each, and remember almost none of it later.

The real question comes down to responsibility- but responsibility to whom? Any organization can go broke quickly trying to responsibly and faithfully interpret history. Those who realize the responsibility is towards the future of the organization will be forced to start looking at things another way, and viewed through that lense what makes the organization the money it needs to continue-in my mind- should be more important that the historical inaccuracies of a written work. Bottom line is- are you better off having the Pullman Company of Oakland occupying valuable shelf space in your shop, or would you be better off with train shaped suckers? I think I know which one will sell better...

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV

When principal writing of your book is complete, print it out and send it to others who know the subject more than you, along with a red pen. Or if you prefer, send a Word doc, though not everyone knows how to use the "red pen" in Word.

It was a great deal harder in 1980 when people did not possess easy-edit writing machines in their home, or in their pocket. Today, there is no excuse not to widely peer-review your document.