Deborah Cooke: Author

I’ve been reading underground books again lately – or more accurately, books about underground spaces – and might have found a few you don’t know about.

Those of you who have hung around Alive & Knitting for a while know about my fascination with underground spaces. It might come from the fact that I grew up in Toronto, which has a huge underground network called the PATH. You don’t even have to go outside to move from building to building in Toronto, which is pretty great when it’s snowing like the bejabbers. Montreal has a similar network of shopping malls, subway stations and underground accesses to hotels and office buildings. I always thought that Canadians just liked to avoid winter.

But during our vacation in Paris, we went on a tour of the underground, which included the catacombs. This dovetailed neatly with my other fascination with old cemeteries, which was how I found the tour. (Mr. C. rolls his eyes when I pull out my list of Must See tourist attractions. They’re seldom the usual picks, except in New Orleans!)

Sometime after that, I found a book about the underground tunnels in Paris. It’s in French but has lots of fab pictures and I think I told you about it a long time ago: ATLAS DU PARIS SOUTERRAIN is by Alain Clement and Gilles Thomas. The photographs in this book are gorgeous and require no translation.

There’s also a good survey book called BENEATH THE METROPOLIS: THE SECRET LIVES OF CITIES by Alex Marshall. He discusses both history and technology for twelve cities – New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Mexico City, Paris, Rome, London, Moscow, Cairo, Tokyo, Beijing and Sydney. The geek in me just loves the cross sections for each city.

And finally, I’ve found a truly yummy book. I knew of this one when it was only available in hard cover, but recently realized that the soft cover edition had been released. Much more economical, with lots of fabulous pix. NEW YORK UNDERGROUND: THE ANATOMY OF A CITY by Julia Solis is filled with history, anecdote and adventure.

I still want a similar volume for Montreal and one for Toronto. There are unused subway stations in Toronto, for a line that was never put into service – they use them for movie shoots. I wonder what else is down there. And one for London, of course – as much as I enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE, I want a non-fiction resource.

Do you know of more such “underground” books? (Or am I just going to have to write them myself?! LOL!)

I wouldn’t mind finding a comprehensive guide to old cemeteries either – it could start with Highgate in London, include Pére Lachaise in Paris, then move on from there.

Tell me about the weird subjects you find irresistible in big fat books.