The Arts & Crafts House of Massachusetts

A Style Rediscovered

Heli Meltsner

At the opening of the twentieth century, Massachusetts architects struggled to create an authentic new look that would reflect their clients’ increasingly informal way of life. Inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, the result was a charming style that proved especially appropriate for the rapidly expanding suburbs and vacation houses in the state—charming but overlooked, principally because the style is somewhat difficult to describe.

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The Adirondack Guideboat

Stephen B. Sulavik

with revisions and additions by Edward Comstock, Jr. & Christopher Woodward

What started as a mid-19^th century working boat for sportsmen and their guides has turned into an icon of the Adirondacks. Now, its full story is being told in a lavishly illustrated new book. Available in Soft Cover and Limited Edition Hard Cover

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The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down

Howard Mansfield 

While reporting on citizens fighting natural gas pipelines and transmission lines planned to cut right across their homes, Howard Mansfield saw the emotional toll of these projects. “They got under the skin,” writes Mansfield. “This was about more than kilowatts, powerlines, and pipelines. Something in this upheaval felt familiar. I began to realize that I was witnessing an essential American experience: the world turned upside down. And it all turned on one word: property.” Read more/Buy

She Lived, And the Other Girls Died

Kirsti Sandy 

Winner of the 2017 Monadnock Essay Collection Prize

“She Lived, and the Other Girls Died: Essays, is a compelling coming-of-age memoir that opens in the blue-collar city of Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1974, when the six-year-old protagonist, shuffled among various caretakers, first hears the word “Watergate.” It chronicles her adventures, misadventures, shifting perspectives, and gradual loss of innocence during the tumultuous 1970s and ’80s….”

–– Judge Andrew Merton

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The Light of What Comes After

Jen Town

Winner of the 2017 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize 

“‘I waited for you,’ writes Jen Town, “with a slip / of a message you’d burn after I’d gone.” And, true to its word, this is a book that lies in wait, always about to burst into flame.”

—Natalie Shapero, author of Hard Child      Read more/Buy

Circle Around Monadnock

Francelia Clark

Francelia Clark and her friends, Pam Godin and Shelley Mozier, find and follow two of the oldest trails in the Monadnock region into history—on horseback.

“To the Slow Food movement add a new one: Slow Travel. In Circle Around Monadnock, Francelia Clark and her companions, on horseback, cover eleven miles one day, six the next, following the traces of the old ways. They touch the essential mysteries of New England, the mix of past lives, the history that is known and unknowable, the fleetingness of even well-set granite foundations. These Slow Travel pioneers are time travelers, observers of the near-at-hand. They prove that what Thoreau said in 1858 still holds: Monadnock is ‘a wild place enough.’”

—Howard Mansfield            Read more/Buy

The Contrarian Voice

Ernest Hebert

The author of the critically acclaimed novel series The Darby Chronicles is back with his first poetry collection, The Contrarian Voice.

“Like his novels, Ernest Hebert’s poems are “truthful to the real world,” yet steeped in his own deep, often dark imagination. These are poems about our relationships — with loved ones, jobs, friends, enemies, and, as Hebert has said of his fiction, “that steamy, dreamy on-going nut-case story in our heads.”

–– Scott Edward Anderson, author of Fallow Field: Poems

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A Time to Dance

Richard Nevell

Long before “social capital” emerged as a world-wide term for trust and community building, country dancing had been meeting this need of urban and rural Americans alike for more than three centuries. A Time to Dance explores the evolution of American country dance from Colonial time to the present, taking the reader across the USA in search of the reasons why so many millions of Americans love to share the country dance floor with friends, neighbors, even total strangers, in a celebration of community.

—Lewis M. Feldstein, co-author with Robert D. Putnam of Better Together: Restoring the American Community

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Summer Over Autumn

Howard Mansfield

Howard Mansfield’s essays will delight readers from all walks of life: whether small town or big city, and encourage them to further explore their own homes. Mansfield has an uncanny ability to entice hidden stories from everything around him and it shines through in these essays about neighbors, animals, tractors, trees, yard sales, funerals, money, and fidelity to time itself. Read more/Buy

Albert Duvall Quigley

Artist, Musician, Framemaker 1891, 1961

Albert D. Quigley Exhibit Committee

Albert Duvall Quigley spent most of his life painting the people and landscapes of the Monadnock region.  A self-taught musician, he built and repaired fiddles, wrote dance tunes, and played at local dances. He also made frames known for their beautiful workmanship and originality, and prized by many Monadnock artists. This catalog has been compiled for an exhibition celebrating Quigley’s life and work that will open at  the Historical Society of Cheshire County (NH) in May 2017, and for the 250th anniversary celebration of the town of Nelson, NH, where Quigley lived for many years. Read more/Buy