At our Los Angeles offices, in addition
to the library of books and videotapes, and the photograph archive,
the Center collects ephemeral media pertaining to land use issues
and sites, in a phalanx of filing cabinets, as part of the Land
Use Database. This collection consists of timely articles from
regional newspapers, magazines of nation-wide and regional distribution,
academic journals, even zines and literary journals when pertinent.
We continually seek to expand this collection and to keep it
up to date, as we draw upon this material for inspirations for
projects, exhibits, and for answers to the many requests for
information we receive.
As well as thanking those of you who have been
sending us these items, we would like to encourage our newsletter
readership to share with us your discoveries and your interests,
however obvious, however obscure. Thanks, for example, to Janyce
Collins, who mailed in a complete set of back issues of the
now out of print Edging West magazine, a short lived
but interesting zine about places and Ýlife-stylesÏ in the New
West. George Budd recently sent us an article from Oil and
Gas Journal, an industry trade magazine, about the expansion
of oil operations at Prudhoe Bay. Suzanna Mast gave the CLUI
a subscription to Out West: the Newspaper that Roams,
a self-published newspaper put out by a writer who spends his
life wandering the countryside in his RV. Thank you Melinda
Stone, who sent us a copy of the classic Bohemian Grove and
Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness, by
G. William Domhoff. An old brochure about the Johnstown Inclined
Plane, the steepest vehicular incline in the world, was sent
to us by Jim Fox, after his recent trip to Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
And of course, special thanks to Mark Curtin of Houston, Texas,
for the huge box he ships us every couple of months with especially
interesting issues of Aviation Week and Space Technology,
International Construction, Invention and Technology, and
many other fascinating trade journals and clippings.
One of the great sources for stories and tales
about land use across the country is local newspapers. An article
from the Goshen News was sent to us by John Tottenham
of Los Angeles, about some new (miniature) construction activity
at the Bird™s Eye View Museum, at Wakarusa, Indiana, where the
curator, DeVon Rose, is slowly reproducing the entire town of
Wakarusa as it appeared in 1965, in a miniature model. Recently,
a New York Times reader named Andrew Wagner, who works
for Dwell Magazine, sent us the Times™ point of view
of the possible Wendover merger and the re-alignment of the
Nevada state line. We had been following this situation in the
two Wendover papers we subscribe to, but had not seen what the
Ýpaper of recordÏ had to say about the issue.
Regular donors of useful material are kept on
our mailing list and receive our newsletter for free. It™s as
simple as cutting it out and putting it in an envelope, or e-mailing
us. Whatever you send will make it back out there, in
some way or another.
