In her essay “A Poet for a Father,” included in Thomas Hornsby Ferril and the American West (1996), edited by Robert C. Baron and others, Anne Ferril Folsom tells of practical fixtures and fanciful contraptions her father constructed for family and visitors to the Ferril home in Denver, Colorado. When Thomas Hornsby Ferril, poet, essayist, and journalist, added a third floor to the family home at 2123 Downing Street—now headquarters for the Library of Congress-affiliated Colorado Center for the Book—the unused space between the roof and an interior wall created a long, empty, triangular tunnel. Sharing Nature's opinion of a vacuum, Folsom's father scrounged old rails from a mine, had wheels cast, and built a flat car on which one or two people might propel themselves the full length of the house. Folsom wryly notes, “The tunnel itself was pleasantly dark, except for an occasional first-aid station equipped...