Book: roadside relics
A post this week pointed to a new Casemate Press title collecting abandoned roadside attractions, pairing photos with short histories for each site. (x.com) The recommendation frames the book as a field guide for people who track decay across travel routes. (x.com)
A new Casemate title is turning abandoned roadside attractions into a paperback map of the Southwest’s fading tourist landscape. (casemateipm.com) *Abandoned Roadside Attractions: Under a Southwest Moon* is a 96-page paperback by California photographer Ken Lee, published under the America Through Time imprint in the Abandoned Union series. Casemate lists a January 2, 2025 sales date, a $24.99 price, and coverage of sites in California, Arizona, and Nevada. (casemateipm.com) Casemate says the book pairs Lee’s night photographs with short histories of “forgotten tourist traps,” “strange sculptures,” and other roadside stops built to catch passing motorists. Retail listings describe examples including a Flintstones-themed village, a 1950s-style waterpark, a mountain Santa’s Village, and 129 metal prehistoric-animal sculptures in the desert. (casemateipm.com, walmart.com) The book lands as “abandoned” photography and roadside-history publishing keep overlapping in niche travel culture. Casemate’s distributor pages show America Through Time and related series releasing multiple 96-page regional history and place books in 2024, 2025, and 2026. (casematepublishers.com, casemateipm.com, casemateipm.com) Lee’s pitch is less highway nostalgia than documentation after the crowds are gone. His author bio says he has spent more than nine years exploring the Southwest and parts of the East Coast with a camera, tripod, and colored flashlight, and that this is one of four books on abandoned places. (kenleephotography.com) That night-work approach is central to the look of the project. Lee’s site says he specializes in long exposure and light painting, and a February 2025 podcast description said he discussed how he finds these sites, the ethics of photographing them, and the challenges of shooting in unpredictable conditions. (kenleephotography.com, kenleephotography.wordpress.com) The audience is the small but durable one that treats roadside ruins as destinations rather than detours. A February 27, 2025 PetaPixel profile said Lee drove thousands of miles across the Southwest to document abandoned attractions for a project that became this book. (petapixel.com) In that sense, the book works as both photo collection and route planner: a record of places built to pull drivers off the road, and now revisited because they are falling apart. (casemateipm.com, petapixel.com)
