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Reviews
| Canals (Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks in Architecture, Design, and Engineering). By Robert J. Kapsch. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004. 310 pp., 800+ illus., maps, diags., glossary, bibl., index, CD-ROM. $75 hb (ISBN 0-393-73088-3).
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It was something of a surprise to receive a work to review that at first appeared almost like an illustrated coffee table book but turned out to be serious scholarship. In this oversized volume, Robert Kapsch has produced an excellent overview of American canals. It is supplemented, moreover, by a CD that contains profuse canal illustrations coded to prints and photographs from the online catalog of the Library of Congress, which contains more than a million items that draw heavily on the library's Historic American Building Survey and Historic American Engineering Record collections.
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Kapsch's readable text is supplemented by useful information in the legends supporting each of the volume's 800-plus illustrations. The volume's collection of photography is superb and made more useful by being reproduced on the included CD—slightly enlarged and clearer, also more manipulative using the potential of the computer. Canals often supplements a photograph of a canal structure with a line diagram of that structure. The work is further enhanced by an extensive bibliography and a glossary of canal terms.
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One negative aspect of the book, however, is a lack of balance. Canals provides brief yet adequate descriptions of most of America's canals but devotes two complete chapters to particular canals: the C&O (Chesapeake & Ohio), where Kapsch had an important role in preservation and restoration, and New Jersey's unique Morris Canal with its plethora of inclined planes, where he relied on the extensive collections of the Canal Society of New Jersey.
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| Canals should be useful for a broad audience. Beginners can learn the basics of canal structures, operations, and history, while serious canal students can learn much from the designs of canal structures and from the illustrations with the coding to their original sources. While somewhat expensive, this well-written and well-designed book is worth its cost. |
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