RMW Ramblings

  The Mystery of Ruth Belew The Dell Mapbacks   As a kid in the 1940’s I was fascinated by the piles of paperback mysteries that sat around my grandmother’s cottage.   I poured over them in the flickering yellow light of the “coal-oil” (kerosene) lamp   while playing Hot Pretzels or The Pennsylvania Polka on the crank-up Victorola.    I studied them carefully, but I wasn’t reading the stories.   Instead I was fascinated with the covers.   Specifically the back covers.   The mysteries   were 25¢ Dell paperbacks, those we know today as “mapbacks.”       Over the years I have accumulated two dozen or so of these graphic design classics.   They were produced from 1943 to 1953.   They had a style all their own.   Dell Books was a venture of George Delacourte, a New York publisher, and Lloyd Smith of Western Printing and Lithography in Racine, Wisconsin.   (Much of this information comes fro...

    Bridges of the Brandywine The September 2nd flood on the Brandywine seriously damaged the footbridge that gives access to Alapocas Park from the Highlands side of the river. It is now closed. That bridge, and all of the other bridges over the Delaware section of the Brandywine, appear on a pictorial map of the Brandywine I published in 2006. The footbridge, number 9 on the map, originally served the Bancroft Mills, as did a second bridge downstream, number 10, viewable by hiking along the riverfront trail in Alapocas Park.. I researched the pictomap by photographing the existing bridges, and researched the now gone historic bridges at the Delaware Historical Society and the Hagley Museum & Library.  I painted individual watercolors of the bridges depicted and assembled the map digitally.  The key to the bridges in the upper right corner is modeled on Delaware's historical markers that you see along our streets and roads. The iron girder pattern on the borde...