Stuck at home? What better time to curl up with a good book. Consider adding some of these new titles to your World’s Columbian Exposition bookshelf.
Note: We provide this announcement of new titles without any compensation from authors or publishers. We encourage shopping through independent local book dealers such as IndieBound and Bookshop.org.
NONFICTION
Fair Tricks: The Magicians at the Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893 by Jim and Sage Hagy. Reginald Scot Books, 2019. 121 pages. Paperback.
This enchanting volume investigates the magicians who performed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and in Chicago at the time. The authors provide a census of performers ranging from the young Harry Houdini and Howard Thurston to the Hindoo Jugglers performing on the Midway. With thorough research and expertise in magic, they separate fact from legend and reveal the fascinating intersections of performers from around the world sharing their tricks.
Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism during Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair by Rebecca Graff. University Press of Florida, 2020. 220 pages. Hardcover, $85.00. ISBN: 9780813066493.
Using archaeological and archival research on the site of the 1893 World’s Fair in Jackson Park, Graff examines artifacts, architecture, and written records from the 1893 fair’s Ohio Building. Graff discusses how the fair’s ephemeral nature gave it transformative power in Chicago society and also examines artifacts from the Charnley-Persky House in Chicago.
Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans and Views of Communities and Private Estates by Frederick Law Olmsted, edited by Charles E. Beveridge, Lauren Meier, and Irene Mills. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 608 pages. Hardcover, $74.95. ISBN: 9781421438672.
Lavishly illustrated with over 500 historic images, this latest installment in “The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted” series presents Olmsted’s design commissions for a wide range of projects. Chapter Eight on “expositions” includes his work on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition fairgrounds in Jackson Park, also featured on the color cover.
Playing Cards of the White City: Tickets and Colorful Curiosities from Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair by Ephraim Durnst. Classic Game Room Publishing, 2020. 220 pages. Paperback, $39.95. ISBN: 979-8621820978.
A full-color book with high-resolution images of playing cards, tickets and other memorabilia from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
Electricity at the World’s Fair of 1893 Columbian Exposition: Illustrated Enlarged Special Edition by John Barrett. Classic Game Room Publishing, 2020. 514 pages. Paperback, $29.95. ISBN: 9798601885362.
Mark Bussler, filmmaker of the Columbian Exposition documentary Expo: Magic of the White City (2005), has designed this new reprint edition of the original book (R. R. Donnelley, 1894) by the chief of the electricity department at the 1893 World’s Fair.
Art in the Gallery of the 1893 World’s Fair: Enlarged Illustrated Special Edition by Charles Kurtz. Classic Game Room Publishing, 2020. 342 pages. Paperback, $19.95. ISBN: 979-8636918318.
A reprint of Illustrations from the Art Gallery of the World’s Columbian Exposition (George Barrie, 1893) by the Assistant Chief of the Art Department at the 1893 World’s Fair.
Chicago’s White City Cookbook: 2000 Classic Recipes Inspired by the 1893 World’s Fair. Classic Game Room Publishing, 2020. 342 pages. Paperback, $19.95. ISBN: 979-8636918318.
A reprint of The Home Queen World’s Fair Souvenir Cookbook (George F. Cram Pub. Co., 1893) features “two thousand valuable recipes on cookery and household economy, menus, table etiquette, toilet, etc.”
A Shoppers’ Paradise: How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown by Emily Remus. Harvard University Press, 2019. 304 pages. Hardcover, $41.00. ISBN: 9780674987272.
Remus’ research explores the largely unheralded revolution in women’s rights that took place in the streets and stores of the business district of Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. During the 1893 World’s Fair, “moneyed women flocked to this dynamic metropolis” and “produced the cultural standards that Chicago businessmen distributed to the rest of the country.” Chapter 2 chronicles the forgotten but fascinating “Hoopskirt War of 1893.”
City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893–1934 by Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck. University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 300 pages. Paperback, $30.00. ISBN: 9781496222220.
A new paperback edition of the 2015 publication that opens with a look at the diverse group of Native Americans who worked at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Beck explores the topic in much greater detail in his monograph Unfair Labor? (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893–1930 edited by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed. University of Illinois Press, 2020. 296 pages. Paperback, $28.00. ISBN: 9780252084928.
“The Columbian Exposition exerted enormous centripetal pull on the imaginations of black people across the nation,” writes Richard Courage in the introduction. In his opening chapter on “The Rise of Black Chicago’s Culturati,” Christopher Robert Reed observes that “at this monumental event, small clusters of black Chicago’s minute, Columbian-era intelligentsia laid the groundwork for the early twentieth-century’s growth, evolution, and progression of black creative production in the performing, visual, and literary arts.” John McCluskey Jr.’s “Journey to Frederick Douglass’s Chicago Jubilee” (Chapter 2) analyzes the events and significance of Colored American Day, held at the Fair on August 25, 1893. In Chapter 3, Mary Jo Deegan profiles “Fannie Barrier Williams, the New Negro, and Black Feminist Pragmatism, 1893–1926,” who addressed the World’s Parliament of Religions with a speech titled “Religious Duty to the Negro.”
The City in a Garden by John Mark Hansen. University of Chicago, 2019. 359 pages. Paperback, $34.98. ISBN: 9781647130817.
John Mark Hansen, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, tells the stories of Hyde Park and Kenwood through the experiences and lives of its residents. The historical guide explores how the Chicago neighborhood hosted the 1893 World’s Fair in Jackson Park.
City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present by Alex Krieger. Belknap Press, 2019. 464 pages. Hardcover, $35.00. ISBN: 9780674987999.
A sweeping history of American cities and towns, and the utopian aspirations that shaped them, by one of America’s leading urban planners and scholars, who writes that “the influence of the Chicago World’s Fair on American urbanism and cultural aspirations has been substantial.”
FICTION
The Fair by John A. Heldt. Independently published, 2020. 327 pages. Paperback, $9.99. ISBN: 9798664618761.
Heldt’s second novel in his “Time Box” saga follows the Lane family as they head to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in a time machine.
The Untimely Journey of Veronica T. Boone: Part 3—The White City by D. M. Sears. MacGregor Books, 2018. 225 pages. Paperback, $9.99. ISBN: 9780996231565.
More time travel! When her school is attacked by time-traveling Pug-Nasties, twelve-year-old Molly fights back. Aided by the mysterious Veronica T. Boone, she jumps through time herself to stop the Nasties where they began, in Chicago in 1893.
Visitations 5: The Snake Lady of the Fair by Scott Larson. Visitations Comics, 2020. 64 pages. Print comic book, $10.00; digital $5.00.
Mayhem and menace abound in the phantasmagoric other-world Chicago that Larson has created in his Visitations comic series. From the explosive opening in Gracehill Cemetery in Issue 1, we have arrived on the fairgrounds of the Columbian Exposition. The fast-paced adventure weaves its way through a White City and Midway Plaisance both fascinating and familiar, until a creepy descent into a secret tunnel beneath the Street in Cairo.
Fatality at the Fair by Mathilda R Thompson. Independently Published, 2019. 191 pages. Paperback, $14.99. ISBN: 9781086203745.
Sergeants Weber and Rafferty work to solve a crime at the 1893 World’s Fair.
Palmer Girl by Dawn M. Klinge. Independently published, 2020. 248 pages. Paperback, $15.99. ISBN: 9781734643411.
The daughter of a New York insurance tycoon travels to Chicago for the Exposition. While staying at the famed Palmer House Hotel and working at Marshall Field’s department store, she finds romance in the city.
Exposing the Expositions 1851–1915: Ancient Rome in America? by Howdie Mickoski. Independently published, 2019. 236 pages. Paperback, $16.95. ISBN: 9788269126617.
Launching from the question of “Have we been lied to?” [spoiler alert: No.], the volume wonders if the White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and other fairs, were “built in impossible times” and so must instead be restored buildings of an ancient civilization.