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Manhole Covers (The MIT Press) by Mimi Melnick; photographs by Robert A. Melnick is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Manhole Covers (The MIT Press) about?

A poetic study of a singular form of urban industrial art and its place in American culture. They lie underfoot, embellished and gleaming. They seal off and provide entry to an underground world of conduits, water mains, power lines, and sewers. They appear by the thousands in our cities, but very few people ever look at them or think about them as art. At once completely ordinary and totally unexpected, manhole covers present an infinite variety of design in the commonplace as well as a record of defunct utility companies, forgotten business firms, and obsolete foundries. Manhole Covers documents this singular form of urban industrial art and its place in American culture. Mimi and Robert Melnick first revealed their obsession with street hardware twenty years ago in a remarkable little book called Manhole Covers of Los Angeles (1974). Printed in a small format and a limited edition, it quickly went out of print and is now a scarce collector's item. But that was just an introduction to their larger project, which has come to fruition in this book of 200 photographs and an extended narrative documenting manhole covers throughout the United States and discussing the history of their

Author

Mimi Melnick; photographs by Robert A. Melnick

Publisher

The MIT Press

Published

1994

Language

EN

ISBN

9780262133029

Subjects

Engineering, Technology, Stem

Rating

4.7 / 5 (15 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14