About that ‘Mohawk’ book cover

The photo is at once ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because the photographer had to grab it on the fly, shooting a low-angle wedge shot in low light as a New York Central steam locomotive snuck up on him out of nowhere. The photo is a bit dark and shows little of its creator’s compositional genius.

But the image is also extraordinary, thanks to the story his traveling companion attached to the photo and the fame it subsequently earned. It has come to be a favorite of legions of steam fans, including me.

The photo, of course, is Philip R. Hastings’ stirring portrait of NYC 4-8-2 No. 3005, a battered old Mohawk bearing down on the Central’s junction with the Baltimore & Ohio in quiet little Shelby, Ohio, in September 1955. Framed during Hastings’ famous series of 1950s steam safaris with Trains Editor David P. Morgan, 20 years later the Shelby incident became a capstone of the monumental Kalmbach book “The Mohawk That Refused to Abdicate, and Other Tales.”

Perhaps surprising to those who purchased the book back in 1975, Phil’s action shot didn’t make it onto the cover, at least in traditional halftone. Instead, his picture was transmogrified into an unusual graphic, framed by a red-and-silver arch, printed on foil paper, the big Mohawk rendered in sharp black ink by the book’s designer, the late Lawrence O. Luser. It’s time Larry had some props thrown his way.

Larry Luser (pronounced “Lusser”) was a key member of the Kalmbach art staff in the 1970s, generally in charge of designing all the company’s how-to hobby books but also occasionally getting a plum assignment on a hardcover railroad book.

The “Mohawk” book was a heck of a plum. Filled with Hastings’ evocative photographs and Morgan’s blocks of fragrant prose, the book gave Larry a chance to stretch out, creating one of Kalmbach’s few truly deluxe coffee-table art books. It was blessed with Larry’s imaginative use of images, type, and white space and backed up by expensive duotone-black printing, a luxury secured from management by Books Editor Harold A. Edmonson.

The cover was a special challenge. Back then — and to some extent still today — railroad book publishers tended to put color paintings on the cover, regardless of the content inside. But color artwork would be ridiculous on a book featuring some of the greatest black-and-white railroad photography ever made. Together with Michael Stephens, a pal in the Sales Department, I rather timidly suggested the cover feature one of Hastings’ photographs, done up in duotone on heavier paper. But no one was listening to a couple of rookies from Sales.

Instead, Larry went with the approach we all came to know as the “Mohawk” cover, spotlighting his drawing of the 3005 and done up in disco-era typography that can only be described as deeply Seventies. If you have a copy, you’ve likely noticed the foil dust jacket doesn’t stand up well to the scuffing it gets on a bookshelf. If nothing else, though, Larry’s design was singular and memorable.

As Kalmbach’s ad copywriter, I had a role in the “Mohawk” project, overseeing the creation of direct-mail promos and magazine ads. Luckily, Larry was my partner, doing double duty as both book and promotions designer. He was easy to work with: quiet, unassuming to a fault, but very sure of what he wanted to do.

Among all the people working in Kalmbach’s Art Department, Larry was closest to Milwaukee’s fertile advertising and graphic arts community. He had studied at the city’s famous Layton School of Art, and, in terms of what was happening in graphic design in 1975, was closer to the cutting edge than his co-workers. I believe he saw “Mohawk” as a showcase for his peers.

For all the praise the “Mohawk” book has attracted over the years —in steam circles it’s discussed in hushed admiration — I’m not sure it sold all that well. Unlike several other Kalmbach titles (“The Hiawatha Story” or “The Nickel Plate Story,” for instance), “Mohawk” never got a second printing as near as I can tell, which is amazing, given the book’s hold on readers’ imaginations nearly five decades later.

I’ll always think of “Mohawk” as Larry’s book as much as Hastings’ or Morgan’s. I hope he took a lot of pride in it. He’d go on to other good things, including winning Folio magazine’s Ozzie Award for Design Excellence for his work on the short-lived Trains Illustrated, for which I served as an associate editor. Sadly, he died way too young: Sept. 12, 2004, at age 63, having retired from Kalmbach in 2000 after 38 years with the company.

Postscript: One day about 15 years ago, Kalmbach’s corporate art director, Maureen Schimmel, called me to say I needed to look at some stuff hidden away in a storage room at the back of our building. The Art Department was getting rid of things it didn’t need any more. One of them was Larry’s original drawing of NYC 3005.

“Are you kidding me?!” I said to Maureen, astonished over the sacrilege. “You can’t throw this away!”

Then she said the magic words. “You want it? You can have it.” So it was that Larry’s “Mohawk” artwork ended up in my car that afternoon. It’s been part of my modest collection ever since. And now it’s moving on to an even better place: the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, recent recipient of the corporate railroad art of the late, great Kalmbach Publishing Co.