A local church, off Highway One in Half Moon Bay, is known for its yearly book sale. I try to go whenever I can and I’ve found many cool things over the years, even when I arrived late. During the pandemic they stopped holding book sales but, at last, they started up again this past weekend, and I found several “winners.”

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, by Terry Tempest Williams.

Aside from the essays, The Hour of Land is illustrated with photographs—legit photographs. On the cover of the hardback is—I could see it instantly as it sat on the church’s table despite the blue paper band—a photograph of El Capitan by Carleton Watkins. Flipping a few pages in is an image of some badlands by Lee Friedlander taken from within his vehicle, from his America by Car project. Ansel Adams is in there as as well (represented by a close-up image of a pine cone–an unusual choice for an Ansel Adams image but one that would, no doubt, greatly please Ansel, who sometimes expresses a weariness of having to highlight the same set of images again and again). The photographs were selected with the help of the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.

Kodak Reference Handbook: Materials, Process, Technique
This binder full of replaceable sections, all printed on heavy paper, would have been a primary source for technical information on Kodak lenses, film, papers, and development—much of what you’d need to be a photographer in the mid-1940s.

It’s a bit of a flashback for me, though I was in the darkroom in the 1980s and 1990s, reading again of this chemical and paper-based photographic world. So much of what seemed so complicated then (e.g. H&D Curves, color filters for black and white images) seems so simple now, partly because I’ve been making photographs now for another quarter century. Another important reason for these topics’s seeming ease is the Internet. Despite all of its flaws, it has evolved into an incredible learning tool, with—in photography, for example—not only bloggers writing detailed, illustrated articles on almost any topic you might imagine, but vloggers making videos, and some of these people are gifted teachers. Discussion forums remain strong and posting a question in one of these will likely put you in touch with other photographers, and if you have a tricky question you might very well discover a specialist in that topic who will be happy to help you understand the nuances of the issue.

The Kodak Reference Handbook is a technical manual from the days when you were more or less alone, as a photographer, and Kodak, the great Yellow Father in more ways than one, took care of you.

A Communese-English Dictionary, by Roy Colby

I had to read this cover twice before I realized what I was holding in my hand. It is moments that make used book sales so satisfying. This book, as you might guess, is a bilingual dictionary, translating the Communist “language” into English.

Here are a few examples:

Academic Freedom (New Left) The unrestricted freedom of professors and students to promote, by whatever means necessary, inside and outside of classrooms, the leftwing viewpoint on college campuses; academic license.

Capitalism n. The free enterprise system, represented as being oppressive, exploitive, and decadent by nature; democracy; Western civilization and its values; the politico-economic system in conflict with Socialism and Communism and, hence, the enemy to be destroyed by any means possible.

Espionage n. Any act or innocent mistake of a foreigner in a Communist country, especially of an American tourist visiting the U.S.S.R., so deemed by Communist authorities for political purposes, or in retaliation for the capture of a Soviet spy. See spy.

Neo-Naked Nude-In (New Left Religious) A “sanctified” version of strip-poker involving the discarding of clothing by participants failing to recite certain verses of the Bible or hymns. The last person to divest himself or herself of the last garment in the winner and may select any one of the group of the opposite sex for sexual intercourse. Also called Theology of the Nude.

There were eight or ten other books, all small paperbacks, along similar ideological lines, all from the late 1950s and early 1960s and I should have purchased them all but instead I selected one additional book for a companion to the dictionary, Dr. Fred Schwatz’s You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists), put out in 1960 by the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade under the imprint of Prentice-Hall which. It sold over a million copies.

Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words

Published in hardcover by the Steve Jobs Archive in 2023, this book was given only to Apple Employees and was not for general sale—although an excellent web version and an e-book (both free) are available. Inevitably, copies of the physical book are now available (not cheaply) on E-bay and, in this case, at the church book sale for $1.

Steve Jobs, as this book underlines, had at his core an artistic sensibility and a recognition that he was, for whatever reason, at the right time and place and that, for equally mysterious reasons, others in that same time and place just didn’t see what was possible. He believed that people needed computers, though ones designed with their needs in mind, and that beautifully made things would make life better. It is his idea of “beautifully made” though, that is woven throughout the book (the idea not at all meaning “pretty” or “attractive, but something fuller and deeper).

I have, since I was young, thought it would be fascinating to work for Apple but to a poor kid in Ohio, where no one I knew had been to California (let alone Europe or Asia or even New York City), Apple was far away and out of reach. But Apple, the idea of Apple (more than the company, much more than any individual in the company) has been one of my bright beacons throughout my life. I am glad to have this book.