My favorite new Los Angeles book — the one I took driving with me on Saturday — is a guidebook from the distant past. "Los Angeles in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City of Angels" is a new issue by University of California Press of a Federal Writers Project guide that works 70 years later as historical snapshot of Los Angeles the way it was at the cusp of World War II — neighborhoods, places of interest (the ostrich and alligator farms on Mission Road), recreation (45 bowling alleys), literature and familiar restaurants like Musso & Frank and El Cholo.

My KCRW column tonight (6:44 p.m. at 89.9 FM or on kcrw.com) praises the long out-of-print book, which has photos by the likes of Julius Shulman and was mostly written in 1939: as Union Station opened, Raymond Chandler came out with "The Big Sleep," Hollywood made "Gone with the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz," and the studios employed writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West.

Those and most other writers working in L.A. didn't answer the call to contribute, author and critic David Kipen writes in the foreword to the new edition. But despite gaps, it's a special document: "If there's a WPA guide to a more vanished American city, beats me what it is," Kipen writes. "Idea bin for historical novelists, iffy crib-sheet for fact-checkers, God's gift for narrative historians, Los Angeles in the 30s is a wayback machine for retrophile Angelenos everywhere."

As one of those retrophiles, I'll probably be cribbing from the guide all year. I became fascinated first, though, by the most vanished aspect of the city: old industrial Los Angeles, much of which was located in what's now called the Arts District. Some highlights after the jump: