By Author

The Admiral’s Academy:
Nantucket Island’s Historic Coffin School

By Margaret Moore Booker
The Admiral’s Academy traces the fascinating history of Nantucket’s Coffin School from its founding in 1827 by a British admiral, Sir Isaac Coffin, through its transformation into a lively center for manual training and home economics in the early twentieth century. Illustrated with paintings and photos, this book is for Nantucket history biffs and those with an interest in American education. 1998 $12.00 paper (80 pp. / 40 illus.)

Nantucket Spirit:
The Art and Life of Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin

By Margaret Moore Booker
This elegantly written and lavishly illustrated volume brings to life an extraordinary Nantucket artist whose story and work are richly deserving of wider recognition. While making her mark in the competitive New York art world, Elizabeth R. Coffin (1850 – 1930) preserved in her canvases the people, landscapes, and rural lifestyles that were fading from the island. 2001 $35.00 cloth (240 pp.)

Sea Captain’s Houses and Rose Covered Cottages:
The Architectural Heritage of Nantucket

By Margaret Moore Booker
With beautiful new photography, illustrative line drawings, and engaging stories, this book captures the fascinating architectural history of Nantucket Island, an American treasure on the East Coast. From its days when the Quakers gained a stronghold on the island, distinguishing their homes with an aesthetic of simplicity and superb craftsmanship, Nantucket has been shaped by the character and tradition of those who have designed and inhabited the tiny island. Today, Nantucket's significant cache of historic buildings—from simple lean-to houses to Federal-style mansions to clapboard Victorian summer cottages—are the subject of an important preservation movement that serves to protect the island's rich cultural tradition for generations to come.

Written by authors with extensive knowledge of the island's architectural history, the book draws upon primary sources, diaries, oral histories, and archived photographs to examine the rich architectural heritage of this designated national treasure. Sea Captain's Houses is a definitive study of the homes that have come to characterize this charming and culturally rich island, making this book appealing to not only Nantucket homeowners but also visitors to the island and all those who admire America's architectural heritage. 2003 Hardcover $59.95 (213 pp / 162 illus.)

Nantucket Lights: An Illustrated History of
the Island’s Legendary Beacons

By Karen T. Butler
Lavishly illustrated, Nantucket Lights tells the story of the island’s lighthouses and lightships and the men and women who faithfully kept them. Dazzling images and a carefully researched text illuminate an important aspect of Nantucket’s maritime past. 1997 $25.00 cloth (151 pp. / 148 illus.)

Remarkable Observations: The Whaling
Journal of Peleg Folger, 1751 – 1754

Peleg Folger, at age 17, sailed into Arctic waters in search of whales on Nantucket-based vessels as small as 50 feet in length. It is an absorbing human document by an extraordinary young man who endured cold and terrible danger; quoted Latin at length; and between adolescent musings about life, recorded revealing details of the early whaling industry. 2006, $22.00 hardbound (84 pp.)

Early Nantucket and Its Whale Houses

By Henry C. Forman
“Anyone with a feeling for Americana will appreciate the Williamsburg-by-the-sea quality of the book.” – New York Times Book Review
An in-depth study of the distinctive architecture of the island’s evolving whaling community. Second edition, 1991 $29.95 cloth (290 pp. / 90 photos / 115 illus.)

Miriam Coffin, or The Whale Fisherman

By Joseph C. Hart with introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick
A best-seller when first published in 1834 and a source for Melville's Moby-Dick, Joseph C. Hart's novel Miriam Coffin, or The Whale-Fishermen, is a Nantucket classic. Based on the life of the Tory “she-merchant” Kezia Coffin, this book presents a detailed picture of the island when it was the whaling capital of the world. 1995 cloth $19.95 (385 pp.)

Quaker Nantucket

By Robert J. Leach and Peter Gow
Based on original research in records long thought lost, Quaker Nantucket explores the spectacular growth of Quakerism on the island and its equally astonishing decline amidst the collapse of the whaling industry a century later. 1997 $21.59 paper (224 pp. / 15 illus.)

A Nantucket Enclave: Monomoy Heights, 1852-2005

By C.S. Lovelace
For more than a century the forces that shaped Nantucket Island have played themselves out in the beautiful neighborhood of Monomoy Heights. As the island has evolved from a sleepy seaside community to a bustling summer resort to a coveted vacation destination, Monomoy Heights remains one of Nantucket’s most cherished and representative communities. In A Nantucket Enclave, C.S. Lovelace tells a tale that only one who cares deeply for its subject can tell: the stories of the men and women who have built and loved Monomy Heights, from sheep commons, to cottage colony, to Gold Coast. 2005 $30.00 paper (178 pp.)

Portrait of Nantucket, 1659-1890
The Paintings of Rodney Charman

By Robert Mooney
Based on meticulous research, the paintings of noted marine artist Rodney Charman bring to life Nantucket's colorful history. 1989 Paperback $19.95 (46 pp. / 20 paintings)

Abram’s Eyes: The Native American Legacy
of Nantucket Island

By Nathaniel Philbrick
Abram’s Eyes tells the little-known story of Nantucket’s Native American past. Generously illustrated, including a detailed map of the island’s Indian place-names, this books brings a fresh and instructive perspective to Nantucket’s history. 1998, $30.00 cloth (308 pp. / 74 illus.)

Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and
Its People, 1602 – 1890

By Nathaniel Philbrick
“For everyone who loves Nantucket, this is the indispensable book.” – Russell Baker
This local best-seller focuses on the real people – great and obscure, famous and infamous – behind the island at the center of a whaling empire. 1994, $19.95 paper (276 pp. /  18 illus.)

Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailor’s Odyssey

By Nathaniel Philbrick
At 22, Nat Philbrick won the Sunfish North American Championship. Fifteen years later he decided to give it another try, embarking on a personal voyage of discovery that took him from the many ponds of Nantucket to the championship in the American heartland. A warm funny, often moving story of a sailor, his family, and an island…and the voyage that brought them together. 1999 $19.65 cloth (203 pp. / 17 photos)

Life Saving Nantucket

By Edouard A. Stackpole
Stackpole was among the earliest to recognize that an era had passed, and without documentation would soon be forgotten. Life Saving Nantucket documents the triumphs and tragedies of a hardy breed of islanders who, as volunteers, manned the early Massachusetts Humane Society sites, later the U.S. Life-Saving Service stations, and still later the U.S. Coast Guard stations, saving countless lives and precious cargo. 1972 $25.00 cloth (295 pp. / 50 photos / 2 illus.)

Smuggler’s Luck

By Edouard A. Stackpole
Originally published in 1931, Smuggler’s Luck recounts the adventures of a Nantucket boy, Timothy Pinkham, during the American Revolution. Nantucket in those lean and hazardous years lay between the devil and the deep blue sea, with the British navy ready with ruthless retaliations against the islanders for any favor shown the Patriot cause. The Patriots, on the other hand, threatened to cut off supplies to the islanders if they sided with the British. 2005, $20.00 paper (310 pp.)

You Fight for Treasure

By Edouard A. Stackpole with a new foreword by Matthew Pinkham
Originally published in 1932, You Fight for Treasure follows Timothy Pinkham, an island lad who conspires with seagoing comrades to rescue his father from the clutches of Algerian pirates.  Some Readers will have met Timothy in Stackpole’s book Smuggler’s Luck, first published the year before this one.  In this story a pirate treasure hidden on Nantucket, a trip to England and then beyond to the Mediterranean, a game of wits with the Barbary pirates and a perilous return to his beloved island are all part of young Timothy’s danger-packed life. 2006, $20.00 paper