JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Right at the start here I’d like to say I know nothing about the Chicago subway system–I would however like to share this little gem on it that I just found. The pamphlet looks unexceptional except for the date, which caught my attention because it is the month/year that the subway opened. The pamphlet also looks like it is a serial of some sort, but it isn’t–it just has a bad title. When I checked it out in WorldCat I was surprised to find that I couldn’t find it, even after a few adventurous searches, thinking that I was just asking the wrong questions of the enormous database…but the results held, and for some reason, the pamphlet just isn’t recorded in being in the many thousands of libraries using WorldCat. It is slim–only 31 pages long–but once you get beyond the first few pages of laudatory photos for the movers and shakers the work takes on a semi-documentary air, with some compelling images, which were another surprise. (The big exception to this flavor was the cover which features some very-regularly-spaced riders waiting for the train, giving the whole image a pod-people feeling.)  

The photos of the workers show a familiar scene of men working in the cramp quarters of caissons and tunnels, not that much changed in a hundred years: