There are many books about Maine, both fiction and nonfiction. Some of the books that can be found at BookMarcs are self-published by authors. The BookMarcs staff wrote and published "The Story of Bangor: A Brief History of Maine's Queen City." This is the only narrative history of Bangor available. The price is $12.95. We also carry books by Maine publishers such as Down East Books, Tilbury House, Blackberry Press, and the University of Maine Press. You're invited to browse the new books below, which have joined our stock within the past few weeks, or see a list of our other Maine Books.

Anyone visiting the innumerable islands that hug the coast of Maine has wondered what it would be like to live year round on a “rock” bounded by the sea, essentially cut off from the world, with life’s priorities whittled down to the most basic necessities. In 1949 Art and Nan Kellam set off to find their own isolated piece of paradise and eventually settled on a 550-acre island known as Placentia, near Mount Desert Island. They would live there year round for nearly forty years.

In this beautifully illustrated volume – based on Nan’s personal journal and the “Big Book,” to which both Art and Nan contributed private correspondence and archival materials – Peter P. Blanchard III re-creates the story of their island years. He shows their singular devotion to each other, finds tantalizing clues to their reasons for seeking isolation from the rest of the world, and considers the mental and physical toll of such an unusual lifestyle on the individual and joined psyches of the couple. The narrative is beautifully enhanced by historic photographs and by David Graham’s recent color photography. While evoking the alluring beauty of Maine’s rugged coast, the book celebrates the Kellams’ courage and determination to follow a distinctive life path. We Were an Island paints a sensitive and sympathetic portrait of a relationship that endured, even prospered, in isolation.
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A grandfather and a geologist who has spent a lifetime observing nature recalls interesting places he has lived and a few of the people he has met from Colorado to Tennessee to Maine.

In this book, he describes biological phenomena he has encountered – whale songs and nesting sea turtles in Costa Rica, gannets and sandhill cranes in Nebraska, and horseshoe crabs and sandpipers in New Jersey. Shorter notes combine to record seasonal events as seen from his home on Red Wing Hill.

He describes his personal philosophy, including his own take on religion, developed over a span of nearly eight decades in our changing world.
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This book provides a rare look at African-American life in early New England. Shedding light on Maine's history of slavery, segregation, and integration, the book traces the rise and fall of a long-forgotten community known as Atusville. The book chronicles the facts, fiction, and folklore of the small settlement near present-day Machias founded by London Atus, a slave who earned his freedom in part because of his role in the American Revolutionary War. Among the tales recovered are accounts of the Underground Railroad, racial violence, and the apparitions of the dead.

"The narratives on the founding of Atusville center on the exceptional life of one individual, London Atus, a slave who played an important role in the American Revolution. James Lyons, the owner of London Atus, was the first minister in Machias, Maine.

"The former settlement tells a number of tales that are remarkable in nature: a fabled secret tunnel and buried treasure; the active participation of slaves in the plots and battles of the American Revolution; persistent rumors of the Underground Railroad and confirmed outbreaks of racial violence, two centuries of interracial love and a "fine for fornication'; a school for black children built in the middle of a cemetery and the burning of a local landmark; the recurring sight of the settlement's last resident driving his horse and wagon through the streets of Machias; and the apparitions of the dead appearing in the burial ground containing an unknown number of unmarked graves." – from the book
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From its earliest beginnings, the land that became Maine produced adventurous inhabitants who went outside its boundaries to do interesting things that sometimes made them famous or even infamous. The inspiration for this book came from the tiny Pacific island of Kosrae in Micronesia, where Brewer native and Bangor Theological Seminary graduate the Reverend Galen Snow converted all of the natives to Christianity, and Portlander Harry Skillins left a record as a vicious pirate and who sired a line of descendants by native women.

Others in these twenty chapters are far better known, such as poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Pulitzer Prize winner Edna St. Vincent Millay, opera singer Lillian Nordica, and Hollywood movie director John Ford. But whether it is Woolwich's Sir William Phips, the wilderness shepherd boy who went to sea and found a Spanish treasure and was knighted by the king of England, or Brunswick's Asa Simpson, the forty-niner who built a lumber and shipping empire in Oregon, or John Frank Stevens of West Bath, the noted engineer who made the Panama Canal possible, or Franklin County's Mark Walker, a 1930's radical during the Great Depression, these stories, varied as they are, provide a continuous range of Mainers' contributions to the world at large. Told chronologically from the time of pre-history Indians in Maine, they end in the present with a look at our current connections overseas and at several Maine women who have dedicated their lives to helping the poor in Central and South America.
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Master Maine Guide Randy Spencer knows the lakes, streams, and woodlands around Grand Lake Stream, Maine like few others. He has learned the ways of the old Maine Guides – from the proper way to prepare shore lunches, to where to find the best salmon and bass, to how to survive in the wilderness – from some of the area's local legends. Now, in his first book, Where Cool Waters Flow, Randy puts you in the casting seat of his Grand Laker, introduces his many "sports" who come from miles away to decompress, brings you out on the trail during fall hunts, and takes you on many other adventures as only an insider can.
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"Conditions may vary." That's the phrase you will often hear when you want to know about Maine weather. With its mountains, rolling hills, flat farm country, and rock-bound coast, Maine's geography is enough to invite a variety of weather conditions. But, as former Maine State climatologist Greg Zielinski proves, there's much more to Maine's weather than that. Jet stream, Gulf Stream, cold Canadian air masses, ocean temperature, and much more contribute to the challenges of predicting the weather here. Maine may be as famous for its winter snow and ice storms as it is for the refreshing summer breezes that blow along its coast. It is home to nor'easters and the occasional hurricane, too. Find out what makes Maine's weather so changeable – as well as endlessly fascinating. 256 pages; includes black & white charts and graphs.
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Penobscot Bay is the jewel of mid-coast Maine, a landscape of close-knit communities and picturesque ports whose scenery is matched only by its rich history. Granite from the quarries on Vinalhaven has built bridges, banks, and monuments in twenty-three states. Ships launched in Searsport and Belfast have traveled the world.

Harry Gratwick explores these and other episodes in Penobscot Bay's past, from the first recorded solar eclipse in Islesboro in 1780 to a covert meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in 1941. He also recalls some of the region's most indelible characters and traditions, including Orrington's Earl "On The River" Morrill and the Vinalhaven-North Haven basketball rivalry.
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On April 30, 1911, a fire ignited in Frank Green's hay shed that changed the city of Bangor forever. From the ashes of the Great Fire, the logging and mill town emerged as a modernized metropolis.

In this collection of retrospective articles, Wayne E. Reilly takes a look at the town of Bangor in the years before the fire, when illegal barrooms and brothels were as rampant as the outbreaks of typhoid and smallpox. He explores Bangor in its boomtown days, when ice harvesting and logging were thriving industries, when steamboats ferried passengers between cities, and when a lively theatre scene drew audiences to the "Little Broadway in the Great North Woods."
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Brownie Schrumpf was a Maine instutution. She was born Mildred Greeley Brown in Readfield Depot, Maine, attended the University of Maine, served as a home economist and 4-H officer, wrote a column for the Bangor Daily News, and actively promoted Maine procucts at the "Big E" (Eastern States Exposition) every year for the Maine Department of Agriculture. Her friends included political leaders at the State and national level, clergymen, academics, her fellow home economists, neighbors, children, academics, and her readers, who felt as if they knew Brownie like a friend from reading her columns. Her life values remained those she learned on the farm: she was loyal, interested, and always willing to help. When she left the farm to live in the University town of Orono for the rest of her life, the farm went with her and she remained true to the values she learned there.

This book looks back over her life and her work, her devoted marriage to Bill Schrumpf, and the numerous persons who were a part of her life – and of whose lives she was a part. Illustrated, with an appendix of favorite recipes from Brownie's columns.
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This is a two-volume, slip-cased, set of the illustrated history of the Asticou Azalea Garden and Thuya Garden in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, which are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2009. This edition will be offered as a slip-cased set only through 2009, after which the books will be sold separately.

The Gardens are owned and operated by the Mount Desert Land and Garden Preserve, a non-profit organization formerly called the Island Foundation, founded by David and Peggy Rockefeller in 1971. The organization owns and oversees the operation of 140 acres of properties on Mount Desert Island, gardens and lands that are accessible to the public throughout the year.

The slipcover, pictured at left, protects the covers of the two individual books. To view their covers, use the links for each garden name in the text above.
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Once upon a time, the skier’s paradise known as Sugarloaf consisted of just a single path, hand-cleared by a small group of avid skiers. They shared the dream of skiing down the mountain named for the wide-open snowfields that made it appear sugar coated well into the spring. In the summer of 1950 they devoted their weekends to carving out a ski slope on this special Maine mountain. That slope – which they named “Winter’s Way” – became the first attraction in a place that has grown into a four-season, multisport resort.

John Christie fell in love with the place in 1954 and he’s been a Sugarloafer ever since, even serving as general manager of SUGARLOAF/USA. In The Story of Sugarloaf, he tells all about the mountain’s ups and downs, including the resort’s explosive growth during the 1960s, the financial slide that followed, and finally Sugarloaf’s comeback and expansion. Knowledgeable about the sport and business of skiing, Christie is the inside source for the story of one magnificent mountain.
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The author, an 84-year-old retired surgeon, has seen a lot of advances in medical care in his day, but looking back over the decades, he wonders if all the movement has been forward. Gone are the days of doctor house calls. Going is the personal touch in the doctor/patient relationship.

This book is a collection of stories that, rather than being literal reminiscences, are a “fiction based on fact” that distills the essence of his experiences with patients during his long practice in Bangor, Maine.

Palmer's stories provide a glance backwards at the art of medicine, when there was time for the doctor/patient relationship to grow and blossom, when listening and caring for another human being in need was the satisfying essence of doctoring.
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The Civil War correspondence of Hezekiah Long.

When President Lincoln issued his call in 1862 for 300,000 more troops, 37-year-old Hezekiah Long of South Thomaston was among those to volunteer. He enlisted in September of 1862 as a private in the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment. Of inestimable value to modern Civil War historians and history buffs is the survival of 128 letters Long wrote to his wife, in which he recounts his wartime experiences and chronicles the major campaigns of the 20th Maine. On a more personal level, he writes home about the poor food, late pay, weather, poor living conditions, disease, and his own recurring battle with rheumatism.

The letters, whose existence has been unknown to historians until now, are published by permission of Charles Snowdale, a great-grandson of Hezekiah Long, and his wife Eleanor. They have been edited by Richardson's Civil War Round Table. The book is illustrated throughout with drawings, photographs, and maps.

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Back in print by popular demand, this updated, full-color edition of follows famed naturalist Henry David Thoreau's sojourns in Maine and offers modern commentary on how the route has changed. Drawing on Thoreau's faithfully recorded itineraries in his classic book The Maine Woods, author J. Parker Huber provides a comprehensive map and summaries of Thoreau's travels.

From Moosehead Lake to Katahdin, returning to Bangor down the Penobscot River, today's traveler can use the book's revised maps to retrace these routes for an hour, a day, or several weeks. Huber artfully organizes these excursions into a grand tour of Maine's most impressive scenery. Beautiful color photography by Bridget Besaw shows the remote areas readers can still explore. Pictures of local flora and fauna help readers identify local species which continue to thrive.

Thoreau was an early advocate for conservation, and his observations of people and places infuse The Wildest Country with his appreciation of his surroundings – his delight in the elusive laughing loons; his sampling of indigenous tea substitutes; and his pact with Penobscot guide Joe Polis to exchange every bit of knowledge each possessed within 11 days.

The Wildest Country is an exciting and memorable journey into Thoreau's, and our, Maine. It's an essential book for naturalists, travelers, and armchair adventurers who want a glimpse of the past – as well as a look at what we can still preserve for future generations of explorers.

Also, take a look at the Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail Map and Guide, a 17" by 28" wall map that shows all three of Thoreau's expeditions.
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A vivid portrait of Maine life in the 19th Century, a time of great prosperity and grim poverty, of fortunes in lumber and real estate gained overnight and lost just as quickly.

In those turbulent times, three women – Maude Webber, Fanny Abbott Hogan, and Elizabeth Emerson – strove to overcome society's prejudices in order to survive and even win a measure of independence. Their lives suddenly collide in Bangor's notorious house with the pink chimneys.
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