Forrest Lamar Cooper loves chronicling Mississippi history.
A longtime columnist with Mississippi Magazine, Cooper will sign copies of his latest work, “Looking Back Mississippi,” at Turnrow Book Co. from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday during Art Alfresco. A simultaneously scheduled book signing by Schlater writer Betty Markham, author of “Delta Gone,” has been postponed.
“Looking Back,” a 224-page hardback book featuring 124 color photographs, documents Mississippi’s history through a collection of pre-1920 postcards. It is published by University Press of Mississippi.
The book’s front cover features a street scene postcard of Greenwood from 1910.
“This book may be the first in a series of books like this,” said Cooper, 66, who lives in Florence.
Cooper writes a regular column in Mississippi Magazine titled “Looking Back.”
“Sometimes it’s people, sometimes it’s places,” he said in describing the more than 160 articles that he has written for the magazine.
About 10 years ago, the University Press took 39 of his articles and produced “Jackson: The Way We Were,” a pictorial history of the state capital through postcards.
“When people think postcards, they think of Easter or Halloween. They don’t think of postcards as being history,” Cooper said.
Cooper has several thousand postcards in his private collection. “I’ve been collecting postcards for 41 years. I’ve collected pre-1920 views of this state,” he said.
In 1987, Cooper donated some 4,600 postcards to the state Department of Archives and History. He said the donation helped to fill in gaps in the department’s historical record.
“That was a period in history where they didn’t have any pictures,” Cooper said.
Postcards became a popular form of communication once the first Eastman cameras came out around 1904, Cooper said. Suddenly common folk were able to take pictures and send them to relatives far and wide.
“The Delta is well represented with postcards from the 1915-1920,” he said.
Often agricultural seed or equipment salesmen traveling through the Delta would use postcards to keep in touch with the home office, Cooper said.
Cooper also has written four trivia books on Mississippi, and he produced 10 trivia calendars in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Cooper said he has 10 book signing events scheduled for “Looking Back,” which is not yet widely available. Turnrow is the first in the series, he said.
“I think that is fitting because Greenwood is featured on the front of the book,” Cooper said.
The hand-colored photo of Greenwood on the cover of “Looking Back” represents “one of America’s towns at its very best,” he said.
• Contact Bob Darden at bdarden@gwcommonwealth.com.
