The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record (Dover Architectural Series)

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I think this might be my third book about the Chicago (1893) World's Fair. Yes its been sitting in my drawer forever as I moved on. Thank goodness for my reading OCD! Gotta empty that drawer!As I actually read this book and followed along with the pictures, I could finally get my head around this event. Simply immense. I knew it was big and was a big deal but the combination of text (and there's a lot of it - in small print) and big clear pictures from 1893 helped me begin to "get" it. So what if we copied France, which copied England. This was our "come to America and come to Chicago and be awed" event. And was it awesome. They built the largest buildings in the world. Made them look like they were permanent. With art and architecture and statues and fountains and colonnades and countries and states and industries and business and everybody else involved. And the amusements - which were also immense - wasn't even the biggest part! Such a rich and phenomenal event. And so temporary too? It looked permanent but actually wasn't even meant to last. At first I felt sad about that but in reality just about every new construction we make these days is pretty temporary.. Houses, restaurants, schools, stadiums. We tear them down and build new all the time.Anyway the text is written for an audience familiar with architecture. I am but not to this extent. It's also written assuming you know who the famous architects and artists and businesses people and famous people of the late 19th century were, which I pretty much didn't. But don't let that detract you. This is a great book about a great event. Does it matter that it was temporary? Isn't everything?

Everything arrived on time and as advertised

Lol. I got this a few weeks after reading devil in the white city. My sister read it after me, and I wanted a visual companion to what we read blah, blah, blah. I got this book, then put it away for months, as I was busy with life as that tends to happen. I finally saw it laying around and remembered I never really read it or even looked through it! I didn't read it, but I looked through and read up on every photo, which is a lot. This book is so great you will find yourself occasionally breathless at the wonder of the size and epic grandeur of this world's fair. The fact that we don't hear about it ALL THE TIME truly amazes me, as I see this as one of the best events in this country's history. There are a few pages that are panoramic split between both pages, and it is on those that you really feel like you are looking down at the fair from like a helicopter, and those are worth the price alone. These photos are awesome, to see how small the people are in some of them shows you the scale of these buildings, and leads you to wonder how they did pull it all off, even if they weren't "solid" structures, the design and detail is just.....sick.

I love this book. I’m from Chicago and wanted to visualize what it might have been like to be there for the Chicago World Fair. I love history and I learned about the architecture of the buildings along with all the facts of the fair. I compared the pictures of the Museum of Science and Industry. And saw that it is the same building from the fair!

Was looking for a simple everyman's guide to the 1893 Chicago worlds fair. But found this to be a long dissertation of the architecture rather than the contents and exhibits which I am far more interested in. I would much rather see a photo essay of the exhibits. Don't really care that much about the buildings.

I purchased this photographic record as an accompaniment to the "Devil in the White City" as others have done. I own an original copy of the "Photographs of the World's Fair" published and sold by subscription only by the "Werner Company" of Chicago. The copyright is 1894. The photographs in the Dover publication are far superior as to clarity as one would expect. The difference is the amount of photos taken of the various participants from around the world in my copy. There are 175 pages of photographs, many with multiple photos.As a child in the 1940's, I grew up in Hyde Park/Jackson Park area and visited the "Palace of Fine Arts", AKA, "Museum of Science and Industry" many times and not until I read "The Devil in the White City" and the Dover photographic record did I realize how important the fair was to the city and to the world. These two books are well worth the purchase price.

I was reviewing "Devil in the White City" for my Book Club. Having the photographs from this book really helped us all "go there" -- As you read Eric Larson's book, you really fall in love with the architechture of the World's Fair, And then, of course, you want to see it all. It's gone, so you can't visit - but you can explore it through this wonderful book.

Certainly not a book of broad interest, I stumbled across this while reading Larson's "The Devil In The White City". Finding myself inherently curious to build upon Larson's description of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, I paid the modest price asked for this; after finished TDITWC, I spent a couple of days leafing leisurely through this; it made an excellent companion piece, and the two tegether did quite a good job of fleshing out the sense of what the fair was like, physically, and transporting one to a different place and time.

Great Book , would order it again and again ... this series i just great.

Very nice book in excellent conditon a welcome addition to collection of circus / fair booksI will look for more books on Amazon.de