| Isles of Shoals, Images of America |
SEACOAST BOOKS
200 images culled from the Star Island Collection are gathered here for the first time. If you love the Shoals, this book must be in your library. Includes rare details about the conference years, the ferries and Uncle Oscar.
200 Early Shoaler Pix
VISITour SHOALS Section
One great thing about the Arcadia books series is that they get pictures the public might never see out of historic archives and into the bookstores. There are thousands of images in the Portsmouth Athenaeum that come from the Star Island Collection, enough for dozens of volumes. Now some of the best of them are gathered in this paperback.
I am a Shoals nut. Can’t get enough of the place, I’m working on my own Shoals book now and my wife worked on a Shoals book years ago with Peter Randall. An entire book shelf in my office is dedicated to volumes about the Shoals, so imagine my joy in being able to add all these pictures.
The amazing thing about the Shoals is that it looks almost exactly today as it did when these pictures were taken in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The hotel on Star looks the same, as does the trail, the monuments, the gazebo,the front yard and the dock. Appledore, of course, has changed radically since the hotel there burned in 1914. Lunging, White, Cedar, Malaga, Seavey and much of Smuttynose are, for all practical purposes, identical.
The downside of these books is that the authors and the historic archive organizations work very hard for almost no return. The publisher and the retailer and the distributor keep almost all the income. The images must fit into a rigid format set up by the publisher, so the authors art involves grouping and selecting the best pictures. These are not books you read, since there is no text – just captions. These are books you study, in my case, using a magnifying glass to examine the small details about what has changed and what has remained the same.
Gayle Kadlik, one of the authors, is a real Shoaler. Her grandfather John Downs was the last to leave the islands when the hotel and conference eras wiped out the Gosport community. She is a Smuttynose Steward and was a curator at the tiny Vaughan Cottage museum on Star Island where many of these images were once housed. Her presence among the authors immediately assures that the research here is authentic. Donald Cann and John Galluzzo have written many Arcadia titles about the New England coastline. – JDR
FROM THE PUBLISHER
It is hard to believe that just three little words, Isles of Shoals, can evoke as much romanticism as they do. Yet when those words are spoken, remembrances of years long past—of one of New England’s earliest and most prosperous fishing communities; of Celia Thaxter and her life well spent surrounded by beautiful flowers, fine art, and high-society friends; of "Uncle Oscar" Laighton and his ancient but unfailing smile; and of the Victorian grandeur of the expansive Oceanic and Appledore Hotels—bring one back to the glory days of the Isles of Shoals
About the Authors
Donald Cann is a member of Star Island Corporation and a park ranger for the National Park Service working in the Boston Harbor Islands National Park Area. John Galluzzo leads public programming for Mass Audubon and has authored more than 20 books on coastal American history. Gayle Kadlik is the former curator of the Vaughn Cottage Museum on Star Island and a descendant of John Downs, author of Sprays of Salt: Reminiscences of a Native Shoaler.
