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 Seacoast Blog #31
February 8, 2009
What a pleasure to discover an advance copy of Steven Achilles new photo book "Portsmouth Firefighters" in my mailbox this weekend. Every time I think I know Portsmouth history, someone proves me wrong. Achilles has been a member of the Portsmouth Fire Dept. since 2000. Like so many history buffs turned authors, his family nourished a respect and interest in the past. Parents who marinate their kids in history give a special gift to the community. Now we are the benefactors. (Continued below)
Portsmouth Firefighters Book Coming February 28
I’ve only had a chance to skim the new book, and will definitely give it a separate web page soon. It draws largely from the extensive collection of fire images at the Portsmouth Fire Department, from private collections, and from images housed at Strawbery Banke. The exciting part for local historians is that few of these pictures have ever appeared in a book before, making this volume especially valuable.
 I’m always surprised when Arcadia Publishing releases yet another book of Portsmouth images. I have seven or eight now of this city alone, not to mention volumes on Rye, Hampton, Eliot, Dover, the Isles of Shoals, etc. There is an entire book just on Portsmouth gravestones, another on Seacoast cemeteries and another on The Music Hall. There is a book of Davis Bros images from the Portsmouth Athenaeum collection, one on maritime heritage, one drawing from the Mason’s Whaley Library and another from Bill Warren’s private collection.
This is what Arcadia does best. Perhaps the most successful history publisher going today, they depend on dedicated specialists like Mr. Achilles, a career firefighter, to do all the heavy lifting. These are really published photo albums, rather than written history. The authors locate the images, obtain the publishing rights, sort, research & scan the photos, design the page layouts and write the captions. For this yeoman service, I believe, they receive about a dollar per book in an edition that usually runs about 2,000 initial copies that retail for about $20. For those without a calculator, that’s less than 5% return for the guy who does 90% of the work.
READ: Why Writer's Starve
These books are, therefore, labors of love. The history text here is encapsulated into just two introductory pages. The message is in the captions and, having written almost 400 captions for my own last book, I can tell you that it is not an easy task. This is not a full-blown history of fire and Portsmouth. That is a much bigger story that has yet to be told. A detailed analysis of the three devastating downtown fires in the early 1800s would fill an entire book – but that would be a book without pictures since cameras came later.
READ: Portsmouth Fire and Ice
But this is one more very important piece of the story. Achilles work segues nicely with Prof. Richard Candee’s scholarly study of the "Brick Act" that followed the three city fires, and shaped the look of Portsmouth today. Joyce Volk has written extensively on the social aspects of fire in early Portsmouth and its connections to crime. We have, of course, Charles Brewster’s dramatic recollections of fires as told to him by Portsmouth citizens who were there at the time. We have those fascinating leather fire buckets that you see in all the historical houses and now sell – sadly -- for upwards of $20,000. And, of course, we have the Portsmouth Fire Society, founded in 1789 (or is that the Mechanics Society?) that still meets in their tuxedoes annually.
This is not a sociological study, but a book for hardcore fire fighting fans. This is the book about the trucks, the buildings, the equipment, and especially about the people, largely men, who risk their lives each day protecting our community. Those are the key elements that historians often neglect. This is a book for the boys at the firehouse, for their families, and for the fire alarm junkies.
This is also a book about the fires themselves, and that is a bonus. For the most part the local newspapers have lost their photographic records. Researching 20th century fires usually leaves us with a fuzzy-dot-screened image copied from a microfilm reader at the local library. Achilles has tapped into a collection of crisp photographs apparently preserved by the fire department itself. His chapter six "Spectacular Blazes" speaks for itself.
Upcoming book signings for "Portsmouth Firefighters" include February 27 (4-7pm) Mainely New Hampshire, February 28 (1-3 pm) Barnes & Noble, April 1 (7pm) Portsmouth Public Library.
Copyright © 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.
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