Baltimore author Blaine Taylor has dedicated his life to books ? literally.
The 60-year-old Vietnam veteran was inspired at age 12 by writer Francis Parkman, who had dedicated his life to writing historical books.
“What impressed me about him was that this guy had the foresight to come up with an idea, set up a plan to stay the course and see it through,” Taylor said. “I said to myself, ?If one person could do that, so could I.? ”
Taylor read every history book he could find, noting that most of the pictures were from either the Library of Congress or the National Archives.
“When I got out of the Army in 1967, I had about nine months to kill before college, so I started going back and forth to Washington [to the Library of Congress and the National Archives,]” Taylor said.
Donna Urschel, the public affairs specialist at the Library of Congress in Washington, says the library houses more than 14 million photographs ? 1 million digitized ? that are open to public use.
“Of course, we encourage and want the public to come and use our photos, as long as they are copyright cleared,” she said.
“I found four major German-captured photograph collections, picked up out of the Third Reich by American soldiers and brought back to the U.S.,” Taylor said.
“I went through the albums and I noticed a lot of pictures of cars in there with the Mercedes emblem, and I reflected back that as a young boy I had seen the same three-pointed stars on cars in Baltimore,” he said.
Between 1968 and 1992, Taylor collected about 25,000 photographs associated with the German regime that had rarely been seen or published before.
Taylor?s plan is to pen about 40 books in order to make all 25,000 pictures available for public consumption.
“I?ve got six books published and 34 more to go,” he said.
The author?s most recent work, “Apex of Glory: Benz, Daimler and Mercedes-Benz 1885-1955,” is the first in a three-part series about the history of the Daimler-Benz Car Company.
