Book Reviews

Screen Towers: The Drive-In Theater in America
By Steve Fitch, with an introduction by Katherine Ware (photography curator and artist)
Hardcover, 136 pages, $45
Reviewed by Steve Spiegel

I’ve been obsessed with drive-in movie theaters for as long as I can remember. The first movie I ever watched at a drive-in was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1968 at a long-forgotten theater in Cincinnati, Ohio. I was five and watching that film from the comfort of our family’s Chevy station wagon, backed in with the rear door flipped open, which let me lie down with my blanket and pillow. This was the beginning of my love affair with drive-in theaters. I’ve been so obsessed that when eBay was a brand-new site, my very first purchase was a vintage drive-in movie speaker! (Yes, I still have it.)

American Sign Museum: Celebrating 25 Years
By Text: Sam Roberts, Photography: Natalie Grilli, Design)
American Sign Museum, 2025
Hardcover & Softcover, 168 pages, Hardcover $84, Softcover $42
Reviewed by Josh Silber

A “Great Sign” will greet you as you arrive at the American Sign Museum (ASM) in Cincinnati. Anyone of a certain age will undoubtedly recognize the iconic totem that once stood out front of so many Holiday Inn hotels in America from 1954 to 1982. And while the Holiday Inn sign remains universally recognizable even after all these years, shockingly, the one outside the ASM is believed to be the “last authentic original” in existence. The surprising history of this Great Sign is just a small bit of the overall story of signage chronicled in a new book, American Sign Museum: Celebrating 25 Years, recently published by the American Sign Museum.

The Golden Era of Sign Design: The Rediscovered Sketches of Beverly Sign Co.
By Kelsey Dalton McClellan and Andrew McClellan
Chicago: Heart & Bone Signs and Heavy Pages Press, 2024 Hardcover, 216 pages, $85
Reviewed by William Swislow

It’s not often that you get to see technical diagrams of ghosts, but this book collects around 140 sketches that are exactly that — design drawings, complete with notes, color specs, and other instructions, from Chicago’s prolific Beverly Sign Co.

Bowlarama: The Architecture of Mid-Century Bowling
By Chris Nichols with Adriene Biondo
Angel City Press, 2024
Hardcover, 176 pages, $40
Reviewed by Ronald Ladouceur

[See: SCA Zoom Recording by Bowlarama’s co-author, Chris Nichols] A chatty and charming companion to Thomas Hine’s Populuxe (1986) and Alan Hess’s Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture (1986). Bowlarama, a handsome, fact-filled book chronicles the entire history of bowling, but focuses the half half-decade between 1957 and 1962, when separate streams of technology, suburbanization, and entertainment culture combined to fuel the development of fantastic and monumental architectural confections throughout the west and across the country.

Mapping Historical Las Vegas: A Cartographic Journey
By Joe Weber
Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2022
Softcover, 344 pages, $36
Reviewed by Ralph S. Wilcox

The book is liberally illustrated with more than 135 maps and photographs. I was pleasantly surprised that a book illustrated with so many maps wasn’t overly technical. Although Weber is currently a professor of geography at the University of Alabama, he grew up near Las Vegas. As a result, his intimate knowledge of Las Vegas and its surrounding area, including Boulder City, Hoover Dam, and Henderson, is apparent. Weber’s book begins with the natural setting in which Las Vegas developed, including the area’s allimportant water resources, which were vital in the initial settling of the region by the area’s indigenous groups and later by Mexicans and Mormons and the routing of the Old Spanish Trail. Initially, Las Vegas was a Mormon fort and rancho, but that changed in the early 20th century when surveyors for the railroad arrived.

Signs of the Signs: The Literary Lights of Incandescence and Neon
By William Brevda
Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2011
Hardcover, 405 pages, $129
Reviewed by Paul Sherman

Brevda’s book is primarily a compilation of journal articles that the Central Michigan University English professor (now emeritus) wrote in the 1990s and 2000s, supplemented with a few more recent chapters. F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, and Jack Kerouac are among the authors Brevda tackles.

Your Sheep Are All Counted: A Roadside Archeology of South of the Border Billboards
By P.J. Capelotti
Whitman Publishing, 2022
Hardcover, 272 pages, $29.95
Reviewed by Frank Brusca

Your Sheep Are All Counted is a retrospective of one of the most spectacular and successful outdoor advertising campaigns ever staged. Over the past 75 years, SoB’s clever and orthodox advertising campaign by founder Alan Schafer transformed a tiny beer stand into a significant tourist attraction. Capelotti’s richly-illustrated tome draws upon hundreds of black and white and full-color photographs from SoB’s advertising archive and roadside photographers such as John Margolies.

Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters
By Thomas Zeller
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022
Hardcover, 239 pages, $53.23
Reviewed by Brian Gallaugher

Central to Zeller’s thesis is the concept of “Roadmindedness,” that is, the belief, current in the early 20th century, that roads would elevate society and contribute to progress; and, even more, that “roads are worthy in and of themselves.”