The book is a visual delight, graced with Jordi Cabré's stunning contemporary color photography together with historic images and instructive line drawings.
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Sea-Captains' Houses and Rose-Covered Cottages
By Margaret Moore Booker, Rose Gonnella and Patricia Butler
Principal Photography by Jordi Cabré
Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" G. B. Shaw claimed that he stood on Shakespeare's shoulders. These three Nantucket authors might well claim their positions on the shoulders of Clay Lancaster, Everett U. Crosby, Henry Chandlee Forman, and other, earlier Nantucket architectural historians.
Beginning with Margaret Moore Booker's compact but vivid introduction, the book leads us to meticulously researched essays on the architectural progression from Nantucket's settlement through twenty-first-century adaptations of classic styles. Consider the old assertion that in maritime Nantucket "the owners lived on Main Street, the captains on Orange Street, and the mates in the lanes." Pat Butler's important essay examines the structures' mansions, modest two-story Quaker dwellings, jewel-box cottages, as well as public buildings in those streets and lanes and in doing so recreates the societal ambiance of Nantucket before, during, and after the whaling era.
Changes along the way were not universally acceptable to Nantucket's resident population. When brightly colored Victorians began to spring up in the 1870s and '80s, schoolteacher Elma Folger wrote to a friend: "The Johnsons have painted their house a deep red, and the window-sills and doors yellow. The Nantucket people shake their heads and wonder what it all means, and what everything is going to." The comment is especially trenchant in view of the "little grey lady of the sea" vision perpetuated by travel writers and promoters. "Summering" was the pivot for so much of the change, as depicted in Rose Gonnella's chapter on the transformation of Sconset and Margaret's essay on development in the Brant Point Hulbert Avenue area.
The book is a visual delight, graced with Jordi Cabré's stunning contemporary color photography together with historic images and instructive line drawings.
Here is Nantucket today, not just "shingled, shangled, shongled, and shungled" but celebrated for the diversity and elegance of its architectural heritage "old, recent, or new; grand or ordinary." It is eminently worthy of publication by the esteemed house of Rizzoli International.
Congratulations all around! .
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