NEON NEVADA: Expanded Edition, thirty years on there's even more neon to glory in!

NEON NEVADA: Expanded Edition
SHEILA SWAN & PETER LAUFER
Amazon.com (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Nevada’s iconic artform comes to life.

Sheila Swan and Peter Laufer take readers on a journey, not only along the Las Vegas Strip, but down quiet, two-lane rural roads punctuated occasionally by a neon sign—those glistening beacons that represent civilization in our vast Great Basin. The photographers’ stunning work captures the argon violets, krypton purples, helium golds, and xenon blues that glow amidst the nighttime desert sky.

The book makes clear that neon is not just a medium for casino advertising. The colorful images of cowboys and cowgirls, animals, desert landscapes, and countless other creative designs all illuminate an aspect of Americana—the neon sign—that helps define Nevada and its businesses, from bars and casinos to hardware stores, restaurants, motels, and theaters that line the streets of the Silver State’s cities and towns, and those rural areas that are barely a blip on the map. With a compelling blend of striking full-color photographs and fascinating historical commentary, the book celebrates an artform that wholly embraces the state’s unique personality.

First published in 1994, this newly updated and expanded edition of Neon Nevada explores the resurgence of this artform during the last decade, which has resulted in an appreciation of Nevada neon that is not likely to fade. Swan and Laufer’s project, this survey of neon, casts the new edition as a defining source for neon scholars and attracts neon aficionados to what can only be defined as a medium as distinctive and interesting as Nevada itself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I spent time in Nevada on several occasions in the olden days, before this book came out the first time. It's very hot there, and even where it isn't very hot, it's very dry. Lake Tahoe is the weirdest experience for a natural-born coast dweller: A big body of water that makes you thirsty to look at because you're so damn dehydrated by the air around you.

No desert rat, me.

The glory of neon is, unsurprisingly, perfect as an artform for a place like Nevada: Best enjoyed in the dark, going out at night in one's air-conditioned car, to admire the exuberance and the sheer delicious excess of it all:

I'm sure at least a few of y'all know someone, or are someone, who yearns to take a holiday in Las Vegas or Reno. This Yule, on your #Booksgiving evening of sitting quietly and dreaming over a book, enjoy one that absolutely bursts with color, vibrancy, and an unmatched sense of place.

They don't come more evocative than this!