Guidebook Scanning Project

We are thrilled to announce the completion of the VAF Guidebook Scanning Project: the long-awaited effort to collect, scan, and place online all major guidebooks and field guides produced for each Vernacular Architecture Forum conference—from the first in Washington, D.C. (1980) to the most recent in the Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula (2024).

What VAF members will find here (https://www.vafweb.org/Guidebooks) are more than 12,000 pages of text and over 1,200 drawings or photographs produced by at least 200 different people over the past 44 years. The variety of building types, locations, and approaches contained in these volumes is staggering: from hand sketches to digitally-rendered maps; from Natchez to New York City, from Santa Fe to St-Pierre et Miquelon, and from Fresno to Falmouth (Jamaica).

One glance and it is immediately apparent that these are not exactly your conventional “guidebooks.” Much of the scholarship and many drawings contained in these guides are original and keyed to the unique themes and tours of the conferences. Previously published articles or drawings are also collected here in ways that helped cast the conference under the lens of the cultural landscape and a particular geographical region—often for the first time. Indeed, some of these volumes ought to be published in their entirety, and in at least three cases, they were—which is why we included links to publishers for the conference guidebooks to Washington, D.C. (2010), Chicago (2015), and San Antonio (2022). What they have in common is a commitment to the practice of fieldwork, a dedication to the rigor of scholarship, and a collective desire to bring oft-overlooked stories about the built environment to the forefront. Seen in its entirety, this archive is magnificent.

And it can finally be seen. We are especially grateful to Amanda Roth Clark, Dean of the Library at Whitworth University (Spokane, WA), who in 2019 began the scanning process after she requested and received two boxes from her father and longtime VAF member Leland M. Roth. These boxes contained nearly all of the VAF guidebooks from the first two decades and they were scanned into PDFs using state-of-the-art equipment by Abigail Burnett, at the time an undergraduate majoring in history at Whitworth University. Clark supervised the scanning process until its completion, which included the solicitation of numerous missing guidebooks and their return.

Several other VAF members dedicated considerable time and effort to this project. During his tenure as chair of the VAF Education committee, PJ Carlino secured several permissions to post the guidebooks and spent many hours performing character recognition and resizing the PDFs for consistency. Brent Fortenberry, Phil Gruen, Sam Palfreyman, Caroline Spurry, and Alec Stewart also assisted with permissions and Ian Stevenson provided legal expertise from his many years working in publishing. The willingness of Jennifer Baughn, Carl Lounsbury, and Cate Morrisey to physically mail a handful of missing volumes from the 2000s and 2010s to eastern Washington state was equally instrumental in our ability to complete this project. We owe them all our deepest gratitude, as we do to all of you who have contributed to the content and production of the actual guidebooks over the years.

The site is live for VAF members. It can be found under the Publications dropdown menu, then click on Guidebooks.

- Phil Gruen, First Vice President, 2024