Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Book Review: Historic Photos of Tampa
text and captions by Ralph Brower (Turner Publishing).

Remember those carefully-packed time capsules your fourth-grade class buried in the school’s playground all those years ago? The book Historic Photos of Tampa is a time capsule of sorts, a peek into Tampa’s history, carefully packed with a variety of photos from all walks of life.

In the book’s preface, publisher Todd Bottorff states that “this book seeks to provide easy access to a valuable, objective look into Tampa history.” Using photographs from the Burgert Brothers — some not often seen in other photo collection books — Historic Photos of Tampa presents local history in four parts:

(1) Beginning of Cigar City to the Turn of the Century
(2) Tampa at the Beginning of the 20th Century
(3) The Roaring 20s, Great Depression and Economic Recovery
(4) World War II and the Baby Boom

Each chapter gives a brief, one-page summary of the local history of that era and each photograph has a caption that gives additional historical information while explaining the photo’s origins, date and subject matter. The book’s photos are marvelous. There are pictures of famous buildings, waterways, horse-drawn carriages, store marquees, parties, industries, Ybor cigar factories, traffic, parades, carnivals, buildings under construction, and a variety of people: famous, not so famous, at work, at play and walking down the street.

I wish that the captions had received as much time and attention as the photograph selection process obviously did. The captions were oddly inconsistent: some gave a great deal of information while others were short and choppy; some were carefully written and edited, while other captions — too many of them, sadly — had grammatical and typographical errors.

Overall, however, the captions are a small part of the book. Beautiful, wonderful photos are the center of Historic Photos of Tampa. The photographs are black and white, but the Tampa Bay area history is colorful.

Book Buzzometer: B+

(cross-posted at www.tampabookbuzz.com)