Here's the beauty of being an archivist: You get in the habit of never throwing anything away. You just fill shoe boxes and file cabinets, desk drawers and spaces under the bed.

        Just ask Kevin Grace, assistant head of archives and rare books at the University of Cincinnati. Or Tom White, hardcore collector, local history scholar — especially architecture — and another longtime UC employee.

        Seems the two of them have teamed up to produce Cincinnati Revealed: A Photographic Heritage of the Queen City (Arcadia; $19.99), a collection of more than 200 photos from the late 1800s to sometime around the mid-20th century.

        Images like brewery magnate Ludwig Hudepohl sipping a beer, Vine Street in 1907, rowboats on Walnut Street during a flood in 1913, convicted murderer Anna Marie Hahn being led to the electric chair in 1939. Stuff like that.

        Most photos, Grace says, are from his and White's private collection — there goes that save-it fetish again — with a few borrowed from UC archives. “The project took us about a year,” Grace says. “The easy part was collecting the images. The hard part was whittling them down from 2,000 to 200 or so.

        “What we were looking for were images people hadn't seen a hundred times, but also ones that told a story. Once we selected them, we split them into topics and started writing. After we wrote, we swapped and edited each other so it would all sound the same.”

        Topics, grouped by chapters, include Cityscape, Benefactors and Scalawags, Leisurely Times, Neighborhoods, Music and Arts and a whole lot more.

        It's at bookstores all over town.

        Dine around: Going to prove once again, give them a reason to go out and by golly, they'll do it. Even in Cincinnati.

        That from Shauna McKenzie, the 28-year-old Pleasant Ridge sales rep and photographer who birthed Food Chain Cincinnati.

        Remember? It's the deal where she put out a public appeal to people, a diverse group of people mind you, to sign up with her for dinner at one of eight ethnic restaurants on a recent weekend. She then randomly assigned groups of four, eight or 10 dinner partiers to the restaurants, so people got to make new friends, eat food they maybe hadn't tried and get exposure to new cultures through it.

        Wellsir, McKenzie says, 85 signed up and, after last-minute cancellations and whatnot, 70 showed up to paint the town.

        A success? Yep: Of the 70 comment cards, 65 asked the Food Chain be repeated once a month from now on. Others suggested every two weeks and still others wanted four a year.

        Another sign of success: One dinner group had such a fine time through it all that the diners formed a sub-group, made a date and is headed out for dinner again.

        So yeah, McKenzie says, she'll be doing it again in July. No dates yet, but to get on her list, e-mail her at mckenziesj@msn.com or call 476-6425.

       Contact Jim Knippenberg by phone: 768-8513; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: jknippenberg@enquirer.com.

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