Behind a bookcase in the attic of a family house in Italy, Alberto di Lenardo kept a model railway that grew across a lifetime. It was not his only hidden enthusiasm. One day at lunch he showed his granddaughter Carlotta another archive: more than 8,000 photographs, made over half a century and unknown in his lifetime.

An Attic Full of Trains draws from that body of vernacular work. The pictures move through vivid colour across Italy, the United States, Brazil, Morocco, Greece and beyond, and they gather beaches and bars, mountains, road trips, lovers and friends. Carlotta di Lenardo, who edits the book, has sequenced them with care, so that the volume reads less as a career survey than as a wide portrait of twentieth-century leisure and ordinary life.

The historical interest is unusual. Because these photographs were never public during Alberto di Lenardo’s life, they do not extend a familiar reputation; they offer an antecedent to the colour work of figures such as Luigi Ghirri. The archive is at once personal and broad, and the book’s editing makes a case for it as more than a family discovery.

MACK’s edition is compact but considered: 232 pages, Swiss-bound paperback with flaps, 21 x 14.8 cm, with bilingual English and Italian texts. This third printing keeps the work available. For a collector, the attraction is not rarity but the chance to see an unknown photographer’s half-century archive shaped into a coherent book, with the sequencing of a relative who knew both the man and the attic.