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Reviews
| Lighthouses (Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks in Architecture, Design, and Engineering). By Sara E. Wermiel. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2006. 358 pp., 500+ illus., diags., notes, bibl., glossary, index, CD. $75 hb (ISBN 13:978-0-393-73166-8).
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Sara Wermiel has tackled an ambitious project—a visual survey of American lighthouses using the photographic collections of the Library of Congress. The overwhelming majority of the 540 images in the book come from that institution. This is a rich visual smorgasbord of American lighthouse images drawn from every part of the country, including Alaska and Hawaii. A CD-ROM with high-quality downloadable copies of the images accompanies the volume. The collection of images includes scores of architectural drawings produced by the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record.
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1
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Wermiel begins with a brief introduction to lighthouse building in America, including a discussion of the various government agencies responsible for lighthouses up until responsibility for them was transferred to the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939. She also provides brief sections on the various types of lighthouses (coastal lights, harbor lights) and illumination systems. Starting in 1820, responsibility for lighthouses resided in the office of the Fifth Auditor of the U.S. Treasury, a position held by Stephen Pleasonton from 1820 on. The creation of the U.S. Lighthouse Service in 1852, which ended Pleasonton's longtime authority over lights, is part of Wermiel's narrative but with a critical omission. Pleasonton had a personal relationship with Winslow Lewis, the longtime provider of an inferior lighting system to the government, which was a primary reason for Pleasonton's downfall.
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2
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The first two chapters, "Stone and Brick Towers, 1764–1852" and "Stone and Brick Towers, 1853–1905," comprise half of the volume. Here and throughout the book, the taxonomy is not clear. In various chapters, images are sometimes arranged by structural form and by rough chronology but elsewhere by location (offshore or "on marine foundations") or by materials used (cast-iron plates, steel frames, or concrete). Occasional sections are focused on the designs of a particular architect or engineer. In the first chapter, octagonal pyramidal towers are treated separately from conical towers. No reasons are given to explain why one form might be preferred over the other. In the second chapter, "tall towers" and "conical towers" are distinct categories with no explanation given of the distinction. Is there a minimal height required to be a "tall tower?"
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3
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The book consists of hundreds and hundreds of individual lighthouse "trees" (the images), but it offers little sense of any larger "forest" of design variations by region, time, or materials used. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect historical context, much less analysis, in a volume that is intended to be a "sourcebook" of images. The principle for selecting the images is not explained either. Does this volume include all of the lighthouse images in the Library of Congress collections?
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4
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I will not point out several factual errors that made their way into the text, with one exception. At the beginning of the third chapter, "Cottage-Style Lighthouses, Dwelling with Integral Tower," the author states that few of this type survive. I know of at least 32 still extant on the Great Lakes, and I suspect that more than 100 survive nationally. The brief bibliography at the end of the volume includes the major standard sources on lighthouse history but excludes a half- dozen valuable regional lighthouse histories, including my volume on Great Lakes lights.
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5
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| If the prospective reader seeks an extensive collection of nicely reproduced lighthouse images from all over the United States, this is a good book to chose. If the reader wants to learn something about American lighthouse engineering history, the reader needs to look elsewhere. |
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