NONFICTION - Nov. 27, 1994

MANHOLE COVERS text by Mimi Melnick, photographs by Robert A. Melnick (The MIT Press: $39.95: 272 pp.). Both everyday and otherworldly, their sturdy and somehow beautiful iron forms hinting of passages to destinations best left unknown, manhole covers have at last found their champions. The Melnicks’ interest began with a desire to have something to hang over their sofa, and though the 300-pound weight proved a formidable deterrent to decorative use, the couple persevered in photographing and researching their subjects, turning out an earlier and now apparently classic book, “Manhole Covers of Los Angeles” in 1974. The current volume, beautifully produced by the same press that published the industrial strength “Gas Tanks,” “Water Towers” and “Blast Furnaces” by Bernd and Hilla Becher, has more than 200 quite fascinating examples from around the country, organized by category. There’s also a hoard of manhole and sewer lore and wry personal tales like the phone call from a friend during a rash of cover thefts in 1990 asking archly, “Mimi, are you redecorating again ?” Melnick is forced to end on a sad note, bemoaning “the stagnation of manhole cover art” and admitting that “rare is the new lid that arrests, that surprises, that grabs the eye.” Sic transit gloria mundi , indeed.