VERMONT ALBUM: A COLLECTION OF EARLY VERMONT PHOTOGRAPHS

With text by Ralph Nading Hill '39Brattleboro: The Stephen Greene Press, inassociation with Vermont Life Magazine andThe Vermont Historical Society, 1974. 145pp. 234 illustrations. $12.95.

The Vermonters of yesteryear - what were they? "Just a lot of lovable but pig-headed individuals ..." A good Vermonter "somewhere in his background" has "a gentle madness, a persistent fanaticism, an honest idiosyncracy." "... hard-shelled, but only rarely is he a snapping turtle at heart...." His merriment, never belly-shaking, "is weathered and dry and flavored with salt."

Spanning the era from 1860 to 1927, this book pictures how Vermonters moved from here to there: by ox cart, sleigh, carriage, stagecoach, steamboat, bicycle, horse-drawn trolley, and iron horse. It tells what they did: logging, cutting ice, sugaring, sheep grazing, haying, pig slaughtering, quarrying and mining, building pianos and organs, shoeing horses, digging wells, hunting catamounts (panthers to you) and bears, and knitting and spinning.

Much is made of "Vermont's real story ... not in facts and figures but in the intangibles of character, beauty, peace and traditions that... still shape the state and its destiny." What, then, is the Vermont landscape? The village with church, post office and general store, cluster of houses about the common, and green open spaces. Vermont life style "is the antithesis of all that is pretentious, overgrown, garish, disoriented, impersonal and anonymous."

In the final section one sees the facts and forms of yesterday: beards aplenty, home-made dresses and patched trousers, fur coats and straw hats, overalls and suspenders, boots and baseball bats. Strikingly missing are smiles on cheerful countenances. Dour is the word for this "... climbing and creative stock who delighted in obstacles, felt certain of their purposes, and proceeded to make over by means both gold and dubious what environment they might en- counter." Aged 82, Aunt Sally, the veteran fisherwoman of Magog Lake, looks as if she had hooked an old shoe. The 29 women at the 1910 Women's Christian Temperance Union in NeWfane seem raised on pickles, so puckered are their faces. "... the second lady from the left, front row, seems quite capable of wielding the axe." The 1909 Sunshine Club, men, flash no teethy smiles. "The sign (upper left) presumably reads: 'Do not spit on the floor.' "

The pro, historically sophisticated, Ralph Nading Hill writes informatively and entertaingly. But the reproductions! Whatever happened to the high standards of Vermont Life magazine editors who spent four years working on this volume? The contents of the pictures are "wonderful," according to Ralph Steiner '21, a Thetford photographer and an authority on the art of seeing. Regretfully he comments, "Half of the information in the originals is lost in reproductions, and the character of the times is distorted. A period we look back to witn fondness is made harsh and disagreeable. The book is a giant step backward. It is what the early British photographers named 'Soot and whitewash photography.' "

Well, uncritical Americans of the Skyscraper Age and the Age of Pollution so open heartedly love Vermont village life and Vermont rusticity (and don't you dare call it "quaintness") that the book may prove a smashing success, come Christmas.