“We didn’t just lose the stars—
we lost the stories they carried. This is a guide for finding them again.”
Restoration Obscura’s
Field Guide to the Night
By John Bulmer, Historian, Photographer, Creator of Restoration Obscura
A hauntingly beautiful journey through history, culture, and memory, Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night reveals how darkness shaped us—and what we lose when we erase it.
Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night is a journey into the forgotten histories, mythologies, and meanings of darkness. From wartime blackouts and Cold War surveillance towers to ancient skywatchers and vanished starlight, this immersive exploration blends storytelling, scholarship, and memoir to reveal how night has shaped human survival, imagination, and resilience.
Author, photographer, and historian John Bulmer invites readers to step out of the glow and into the shadows, where silence becomes signal and memory lives in static. Drawing from personal experience, historical record, and cultural analysis, this field guide traces the many roles night has played—from fear to wonder, from concealment to clarity.
Whether you’ve stood under a clear Milky Way sky or never truly seen darkness, this book will change how you see the world after sundown.
How the Book is Structured
Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night is not just a book—it’s a journey through the forgotten dimensions of darkness. Divided into four thematic parts, the book explores how night has shaped everything from fear and survival to storytelling, surveillance, and wonder.
Part I: Darkness and Defense
This section traces the primal roots of our fear of the dark and how that fear became institutionalized, first in childhood folklore, then in wartime blackouts. From ancient myths to Cold War infrastructure, it explores how we learned to manage, manipulate, and survive the dark.
Highlights include:
The psychology of inherited fear
World War II blackout culture
The rise of Cold War vigilance and early warning systems
Part II: Sky and Spectacle
Here, the focus turns upward. This section explores our long relationship with the night sky—from celestial navigation and constellations to comets, UFOs, and the disappearance of the stars due to light pollution.
Highlights include:
Halley’s Comet and celestial panic
The Hudson Valley UFO wave
Indigenous skywatching and the aurora borealis
Part III: Silence and Survival
This section explores how people have used night for protection, resistance, and labor. It examines those who navigated by darkness, escaped slaves, bootleggers, night watchmen, and those who worked while the rest of the world slept.
Highlights include:
Prohibition-era smugglers
Fire towers and overnight labor
The psychological cost of night shifts
Part IV: Light, Lost and Found
In the final section, the book considers what happens when night disappears, physically, culturally, and environmentally. It’s a call to remember what darkness gives us: stillness, perspective, and a chance to reconnect with something older than ourselves.
Highlights include:
The environmental toll of artificial light
Personal encounters under true dark skies
Why protecting the night matters, for science, sleep, and for the rhythm of life itself
This thematic structure allows the book to flow like a night itself, from the edge of fear to the edge of wonder, from shadow to silence, from memory to meaning. It’s a field guide to something we are rapidly losing, and a reminder that the night still has something to teach us.
John Bulmer is a writer, historian, and award-winning photographer based in New York's Capital Region. Through his multi-platform project Restoration Obscura, he explores forgotten histories, Cold War surveillance, wartime memory, lost neighborhoods, and the cultural cost of light pollution. His documentary-style work blends narrative journalism, personal storytelling, and visual restoration to reconnect audiences with obscured pasts and overlooked truths. He is the author of Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night and host of the companion podcast. By day, he works in public communications; by night, he documents the stories hidden just beyond the glow.
About Restoration Obscura
Restoration Obscura is where overlooked history gets another shot at being seen, heard, and understood. Through long-form storytelling, archival research, and photographic restoration, we recover the forgotten chapters—the ones buried in basements, fading in family albums, or sealed behind locked doors.
The name nods to the camera obscura, an early photographic device that captured light in a darkened chamber. Restoration Obscura flips that idea, pulling stories out of darkness and casting light on what history left behind.
This project uncovers what textbooks miss: Cold War secrets, vanished neighborhoods, wartime experiments, strange ruins, lost towns, and the people tied to them. Each episode, article, or image rebuilds a fractured past and brings it back into focus, one story at a time.
If you believe memory is worth preserving, if you’ve ever felt something standing at the edge of a ruin or holding an old photograph, this space is for you.
The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast is streaming now on all major streaming platforms.
Subscribe to support independent, reader-funded storytelling: www.restorationobscura.com
Contact
Every photo has a story. And every story connects us.
© 2025 John Bulmer Media. Restoration Obscura and all related content are the intellectual property of John Bulmer. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission, except for brief quotations used in reviews, articles, or educational contexts.
We were never meant to live without night. We were meant to remember it.
Named an Amazon Hot New Release in the Environment and Nature category.
Book Details
Publisher: Restoration Obscura Press
Publication Date: June 1, 2025
Language: English
Print Length: 368 pages
ISBN: 979-8218702731
Availability: Amazon Prime eligible | Available worldwide on Amazon
Price: Paperback: $14.99 | Kindle: $9.99