Maine’s working coast, photographed while the old maritime trades were still visible

Alfred Cooper Shelton took the photographs and wrote the foreword; the poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin wrote the introduction. The result is two ways of looking at one coastline: the camera’s record of what was there, and a writer’s sense of the place.

Shelton’s camera is interested in the Maine coast as a place of work as much as of scenery, and his black-and-white pictures keep it as it stood in 1942. For anyone who knows Maine, or New England’s life on the water, the book is a portrait of one moment in that coast’s working history, set down while the old trades still shaped what a visitor saw.

This first edition, published in New York by E. P. Dutton, is in beige cloth lettered in pale blue-green, lightly faded and soiled, with some wear at the corners and edges and no dust jacket. It has a history of its own: Frances Moulton gave it to the Cottons in 1942, and the title page carries what appears to be Coffin’s signature, with a note that it came via a good friend, Dana Cotton. The signature and the readings of these names have not been verified.