For forty years, Philip Ashforth Coppola has painstakingly documented the NewYork City subway in a series of extraordinary pen-and-ink drawings, meticulously detailing the typography, terra-cotta mosaics, faiences, and tile patterns that millions of riders see every day but rarely notice.

Ezra Bookstein and Jeremy Workman have drawn from the 2,000 pages
of Coppola’s sketches to create One-Track Mind: Drawing the New York Subway (May 2018, $24.95), giving readers a sample of the drawing that Hyperallergic has called “the most encyclopedic history of the art and architecture of the NewYork City subway system.”

Along with Coppola’s intricate ink drawings are anecdotes he assembled during his research, typically involving hundreds of hours poring through micro lms to discover all the names behind the artisanship of what is rightly called NewYork’s largest public art project.

Coppola’s hand-drawn illustrations comprise nothing less than “the New York subway’s very own illustrated manuscript.” As Bookstein and Workman explain in their introduction, One-Track Mind was written to serve Coppola’s orginal goal of “bringing attention to the subway’s long forgotten craftspeople. Hopefully, it can also remind NewYorker and visitor alike that that there is beauty all around us.You just have to look.”

One-Track Mind will be featured in conjunction with the exhibit, Silver Connections: Subway Drawings by Philip Ashforth Coppola, on view at the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex at Grand Central Terminal, Feb. 28 through June 24. Coppola’s work will be presented alongside historic subway mosaics and terra-cotta from the Museum’s collection, and a short lm by Jeremy Workman. (www.nytransitmuseum.org)