Tales of the New England Coast Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)What fun this book is! and how unusual. It's comprised entirely of reprints of magazine articles from 1884 to 1910; little glimpses of New England history. If you are interested in history from primary sources, you are sure to enjoy some of these offerings.
From The Century Magazine, 1906: "This is the story of the catching of the cod. It is the story of the cold calculation of man laid against the innocence of the fish."
From an 1894 article on Bar Harbor, Maine: "By one of the contrasts which make Bar Harbor peculiarly attractive, next door to these cosmopolitan shops there still thrives one of the indigenous general stores, where salt fish are sold, and household furniture and crockery...and where you may also buy, as was once advertised by the ingenuous dealer, 'baby carriages, butter, and paint.'"
From New England Magazine, 1905: "The first armed resistance to the British was at Salem, and the first blood of the Revolution, though flowing only from a bayonet wound."
From an 1884 article on yachting around Cape Cod; having been told that deer wreak havoc on the potato fields, the author wrote: "Such conduct on the part of the deer seemed to us very reprehensible and unpoetic, and we tried to fancy Landsdeer painting a group of these monarchs of the glen digging potatoes."
The pages of Tales of the New England Coast are actual prints of the magazine pages, complete with wonderful drawings and photographs. While legibility is generally quite good, some of the old fonts are muddy and the double-column pages can be challenging. Well worth the trouble, though, to read about the life of fishermen, the romantic resorts of Newport and Boston's North Shore, the peculiar history of Cape Cod and Cuttyhunk, and many other topics that must have been of great interest to readers when they were new but are priceless now.
The compiler of this treasure trove, Frank Oppel, missed an opportunity to add value: I wish he had done some research on the authors, artists and photographers whose work is entertaining readers a century and more after first seeing print. In fact the book has no index, bibliography or attribution, so that in many cases we don't even know the name of the magazine. Those articles that DO have a publication name in the front are from Harpers, New England Magazine, Scribner's, and The Century Magazine.
Four stars for fascinating concept and content, and the fifth held back for that opportunity missed.
Linda Bulger, 2008


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From the wharves of Gloucester to the sugar maple groves of New Hampshire, from the orchards of Vermont to the bustle of downtown Boston, these volumes of collected articles - reproduced with illustrations from the original turn-of-the-century magazines in which they first appeared - bring the past magic of New England and its beloved coast to life.

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