A pictorial tribute to the boats of Penobscot Bay, which make their living carrying sight seers and eco-tourists along the coast of Maine. The images in this book are termed "photographic impressions" – paintings created from photos and software, using a stylus as the paintbrush, resulting in a unique form of artwork. In addition to the beautiful images of these boats – fourteen schooners and a ketch – Fred provides a bit of background on each of the craft. Bonus: five Maine Lighthouses.

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For nearly a century members of the Sewall family built and managed a fleet of more than one hundred merchant vessels, mostly stout deepwater square-riggers. No family has been more intimately associated with the history of the city of Bath, then among the most productive shipbuilding communities of any size in the world. Despite a veneer of old-fashioned formalized civility, international shipping in the late 1800s and early 1900s was a highly competitive, low-margin, and often cut-throat business. While the Sewalls' shrewd responses to market changes make a fascinating story, the surviving correspondence from their captains offers adventure of another kind.

Sewall captains were required to make regular reports to the Sewall office, and this correspondence is a treasure-trove of stories about the voyages of Sewall ships-surly crews, mutinies, plagues, shipwrecks, "cannibal isles," destitute widows, and more, along with details of ship performance, weather encountered, trouble in port, and even lawsuits. The Sewalls also invested in railroads and other non-maritime securities and speculations, and also became involved in politics, but it is in the maritime world that they are best remembered. As the owners of the last surviving important fleet of American square-riggers engaged in worldwide trade, it was the Sewalls' fate to draw the curtain on this economic enterprise. No family had worked more assiduously, more stubbornly, or with more enterprise to delay the arrival of that day.

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For more than five decades, George Tice has been photographing the landscape of America, and a number of his images have become icons of their time and field. But no other state has held for him the particular affection of Maine – its rockbound coastline, its precarious and isolated islands, its independent and hardworking people. And unmistakably, there is the sense of coming from almost another time and place, and, in the last decade or so, of a landscape transforming itself all too quickly into the conventional palette of the twenty-first century – of its fast-food predictabilities, strip mall excrescences, and the anonymous tangles of the internet highway.

This book makes its focus the Maine we all want to remember and the coastline we perhaps visited at one time and grew to love. Tice, for the past five years, has concentrated on assembling and arranging his favorite photographs. The result is comparable in its scope to Szarkowski's portrait of Minnesota and in sympathy to Evans's elegy to Alabama. In all, 107 quadtone photographs, from the fogs off Eastport to the lobster boats off Monhegan, from the grain elevators of Portland to the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake. The emphasis is on the coast, on its ports, its people, its geography, and its architecture. And this seems excusable: for most of us, Maine is its coast. It predominates in our mind's eye, in the popular imagination, and in the images featured in this book.

Still, the real rationale of a book like this is to validate the vision and the work of an artist, and this ambition is more than justified by page after page of dauntingly beautiful images, carefully arranged and faultlessly printed. If Maine is a state you hold dear, this is a book that says it all.

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Most people think of lobsters in terms of melted butter and paper bibs, or wharves reeking of barreled bait. But Maine photographer Greg Currier presents a very different side of America's favorite crustacean, one flooded with the brilliant colors of the buoys, boats, traps, and foul-weather gear of the working lobsterman. Currier captures the beauty in the everyday experience of lobstering, as well as in the peaceful predawn start of a lobsterman's day. From the neon glow of buoys stacked for use to a working harbor aglow at sunset, these truly are the colors of lobstering.

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