A Day's Work: A Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs 1860-1920, Part I

These extraordinary collections of photographs and narrative captions have wide appeal to anyone interested in Maine's past. Spend an afternoon with either volume of A Day's Work, and you'll make discoveries that will change how you look at Maine's passing scene. Bunting has a knack for spotting the unusual in a photograph, or some minor detail that, in fact, tells a major story about the how and why. From granite quarry operations to an itinerant cobbler in a sailing scow to hootchie cootchie dancers at the state fair to deepwater ships, his page-long captions place these images in social and economic context but this is not dry history. His research has uncovered a wealth of fascinating, often quirky detail (did you know that mummy wrappings were imported from Egypt for Maine papermaking?), and he makes frequent forays into the Maine storytelling tradition.

W. H. Bunting is also the author of Portrait of a Port: Boston 1852-1914 and Steamers, Schooners, Cutters, and Sloops, and coauthor (with Earle, G. Shettleworth, Jr.) of An Eye for the Coast: The Maritime and Monhegan Island Photographs of Eric Hudson.