Richard Prince, FINALLY affordable.......

Self-publishing is a blessing and a bane to railfans and modelers. Without it, a lot of stuff would never get published; unfortunately, it often means that the sudden appearance of something interesting but not immediate places you in a bind: do I buy it now, while it's affordable, or wait until I decide I need it, only to find that the price has escalated out of the realm of reality?

I always had this feeling about Richard Prince's books on the motive power of various Southern trunklines. Prince self-published them in the 1960s and early 1970s under such deceptively simple titles as "Louisville and Nashville Steam Locomotives." They're compilations of photos and locomotive data, and they retain a lot of self-publishing quirks - the locomotive rosters in his "Southern Railway System Steam Locomotives and Boats" are actually handwritten - it looks as if they were simply Xeroxed or mimeographed for the printing. But the quirkiness and the simple titles conceal a set of extraordinary mechanical histories of the railroads of the industrializing, postwar South, and it's not Mencken's "Sahara of the Bozart:" these were pretty sophisticated operations. Each one seems to have something unique: the L&N history includes a couple of priceless aerial photos of the Hiwassee Loop, and the NC&StL book includes an account of the Great Locomotive Chase assembled by the railroad's mechanical department years after the fact, and illustrated by paintings made by the son-in-law of one of the participants. The pinched face of Clarence Darden, the NC&StL's great motive power superintendent, stares dourly out of a section devoted to eulogizing the road's mechanical excellence: he looks like Kevin Costner playing Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's JFK. But of course he was the man who developed and patented the idea for creating a locomotive frame as a single casting, an innovation that saved countless man-hours of rivet-tapping and bolt-tightening for machine shops everywhere.

I was visiting a used bookstore the other weekend and found an original edition of his "Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway: History and Steam Locomotives." The store wanted $150 for it, which was steep, even for a Prince book. So I went home and checked it out - and, as it happens, Amazon had it new for $29; but the publisher, Indiana UP, was letting it go for $21. The information is nearly perfect - but the market still takes time to react.