J.B. Jackson wrote the best books on landscape, including essays about roads, gardens, grids, cities, towns, houses, and garages. No one has written more eloquently about trailer homes. He studied geography and architecture in school. During World War II, he joined the military and was sent to Europe. Later he became a rancher in New Mexico, but was thrown from a horse and dragged, hospitalizing him for a full year. After leaving the hospital, he started publishing his own magazine: Landscape. The first issue came out in 1951. Fifty cents a copy. It was self-published, printed by a shop in Santa Fe. At its peak, the magazine had around 3,000 subscribers.
In 2018, I visited the J.B. Jackson archive in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I spent three days studying the collection, about five hours a day. It included postcards, clippings, letters, a script for a film, lectures, unpublished essays, and the work-in-progress that was on his desk when he died. He kept alphabetical notebooks: under C there were notes on canals, campuses, and cemeteries. He drafted his essays by hand, usually on plain, unlined, pink or yellow paper. The collection also included copies of his magazine. His opening essay in the first issue ends like this:
“Wherever we go, whatever the nature of our work, we adorn the face of the earth with a living design which changes and is eventually replaced by that of a future generation. How can one tire of looking at this variety, or of marveling at the forces within man and nature that brought it about? The city is an essential part of this shifting and growing design, but only part of it. Beyond the last street light, out where the familiar asphalt ends, a whole country waits to be discovered: villages, farmsteads and highways, half-hidden valleys of irrigated gardens, and wide landscapes reaching to the horizon. A rich and beautiful book is always open before us. We have but to learn to read it.”