[PRCo] Re: New Pittsburgh PCC Book

[Fred Schneider]

At the risk of being a wet blanket ...
His Ken's Erie book is riddled with errors.   And in the few months  
since that was released he has churned out a Johnstown volume and now  
a Pittsburgh release.    He credited (or blamed) his wife on the  
cover of the Erie book for the technical research.    And the  
publisher really doesn't care about accuracy; their only concern  
appears to be getting a thousand more titles on store shelves.   As I  
understand it, they don't even pay royalties to authors.   Rather  
they (I've been told) have managed to find enough people out there  
who are willing to trade their time and effort for books at a  
discount that they can sell themselves!     You have to wonder about  
a publisher whose list of new books numbers 180 titles and the first  
ten I punched in were all printed in October and November 2006 except  
for one.    They obviously don't have time to worry about  
accuracy!     There web site actually solicits manuscripts at four  
different addresses in the United States.   Send us your book and  
we'll make you famous!!!!!    I can believe they will find a lot of  
Alfred E. Neumanns.

I put this book in the same league at the Bill Gordon and Ben  
Rohrbeck books ... you buy them if you want everything on a subject  
but you take the "facts" with a large crystal of sodium chloride.

Springirth's Johnstown book was predominantly a mechanism to display  
his own pictures of that Cambria County city.   That might be a clue  
to the Pittsburgh book.

You want to buy the books?  PTM is selling them.  You can buy them  
through Lynn Cafferty at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, 1 Museum  
Road, Washington, PA.    You need a price?   Call 724-228-9656.  I'll  
bet she would even take your Visa card over the phone.

Occasionally, however, something good will turn up with Arcadia.   I  
suspect Steve Myer's book Lost Trolleys of Queens and Long Island  
might be one of the better ones.  You'll find it if you scroll  
through the 346 books on New York state subjects in their book shop.   
See URL.

http://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc? 
Screen=PROD&Store_Code=arcadia&Product_Code=0738545260&Product_Count=&Ca 
tegory_Code=

On Nov 30, 2006, at 4:40 PM, Matt Barry wrote:

> Here is the link for a new book about the Pittsburgh PCCs, due out in
> "December 2006."
>
> http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=073854941x
>
> Matt
>
>