End of an Era, the Abergavenny Livestock Market, is an interesting book documenting a lost agricultural world which is becoming an all too common phenomenon today. Looking at Robert’s book reminds me of the rural areas in the suburban Chicago area I grew up in. Near my current home is the Hawthorne shopping center, named after the Hawthorne Melody dairy farm that once existed on the land the shopping center now occupies. I remember going there on field trips from grade school to see a “real dairy farm”. This is a story that has been repeated countless times both here and in Britain and many other parts of the world, all in the name of “progress”. One recalls the words of the Joni Mitchell song Big Yellow Taxi. “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone!”