As a lifelong bibliophile with a special interest in reference books, I’m always delighted to find a useful one that I didn’t even know existed. Regular readers know that I’ve been working on a novel, The Big Boom, set in New Orleans of 1925 and featuring the characters from “Until the End of Days“ and “Hellhound”. It will surprise no one who has read more than a few examples of my work that I’m an absolute fiend for accuracy; anachronisms and other such errors really annoy me when I encounter them, so there’s absolutely no way I’m going to let them creep into my work if I can possibly avoid it. But once in a while, the fact one needs is far too obscure for the enshittified latter-day Google to turn up, and since there is no academic library nearby that can turn into a complicated search unless I want to rewrite that section of the story so as to avoid referencing unknown facts.
Now, some of you may know that early 20th-century New Orleans had one of the most extensive networks of streetcars in the United States, but as automobiles proliferated in the 1930s some of the lines began to close down, and after World War II an unholy alliance of Detroit manufacturers and corrupt New Orleans politicians conspired to replace the clean, quiet, efficient, and long-lasting (there are streetcars still in operation today which were built in the 1920s) electric streetcars with filthy, noisy, inefficient, “modern” buses which must be replaced every few years. By 1953 only the St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street lines were left, and in 1964 the Canal Street line was pulled out as well; the only line which survived into my adulthood was the St. Charles line, and even it was reduced to about half of its former range. So when streetcar routes came into the plot twice in the first four chapters of my book, I started trying to find maps of the network in its 1920s heyday, only to be repeatedly thwarted. Finally, a few weeks ago, a serendipitous search turned up a photo of the map someone had posted to Reddit; it was much too low-resolution to be of any use, but the poster had the good sense many internet denizens lack: she named the source. I immediately went to Amazon, located a copy, bought it for the very reasonable price of $20, and it arrived a week ago Saturday. It was published in 1955, was written by a New Orleanian who was an age-peer of my main characters, and was even better than I’d hoped for; it had three different maps (1880, 1906, and a combined 1915-1930 map), detailed descriptions of each route, schematics of the cars, period photos galore, and a wealth of facts I couldn’t have hoped for (such as the fact that the normal fare from 1922 to at least 1955 was 7¢). The whole thing was so exciting that I spent most of the following afternoon immersed in it, editing my text to insert small details, and generally feeling like a kid in a candy store. I know some of y’all probably find this amusing, but as I’ve said many times, “You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the librarian out of the girl.” Or the old woman, for that matter. And I always treasure books which connect me to a world I was born too late to explore for myself.
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Why must I always be put in a position where yelling at some poor working stiff who absolutely isn’t being paid enough to deal with me is the only way to actually get my problem solved?
