A sense of each place, by the book

January 31, 2010|Patricia Harris and David Lyon, Globe Correspondents

New England is an endlessly fascinating region, full of nooks and crannies, peculiar attractions, and a rich natural landscape. Right now, a lot of it is encased in ice, which makes this an excellent time to dream of seasons to come. Every year there’s a new bumper crop of books about our region, and 2009 was no exception. Taken together, they are like the parable of the blind men describing an elephant. “It’s like a tree,’’ exclaims the man clutching a leg. “No, it’s like a rope,’’ says the man feeling the tail. And so on. Curl up by the fireplace and peruse these books. By the time you’re done, you’ll have the whole elephant in the room.

Specialized guides

We remember photographer Ralph Gibson describing his shooting process at a lecture at Boston’s Photographic Resource Center. Each day, he said, he went out with the intention to capture a certain kind of image. It was his “point of departure,’’ and inevitably led to his finding something even more interesting. We feel the same way about specialized guides. They offer a sliver of place, drawing you in to discover everything else.

Jeremy D’Entremont has a passion for lighthouses and their history, and “The Lighthouses of Maine’’ (Commonwealth Editions, $19.95) is a highly readable and exhaustive reference to the Pine Tree State’s iconic aids to navigation. It’s worth picking up just for D’Entremont’s tales of rescues and his scrupulously researched stories of lightkeepers’ lives.

Photographer Jeffrey E. Blackman also has an eye for the iconic, and his new photo book, “Barns of New England’’ (Countryman Press, $19.95), chronicles our region’s rustic rural architecture. Blackman favors authenticity over merely pretty scenes. Our favorite shot is a weathered, dilapidated Grantham, N.H., hay barn propped majestically between gritty snowbanks and a mackerel sky.

When Traute M. Marshall and her husband retired, they set out to explore the art museums, artists’ homes, and other cultural repositories of the region. Then she wrote about them in an engagingly personal and opinionated way in “Art Museums Plus: Cultural Excursions in New England’’ (University Press of New England, $24.95). Behemoths like the Museum of Fine Arts and the Yale University Art Gallery get their due, but so do small gems such as the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and the Freylinghausen Morris House & Studio. Marshall’s “Plus’’ sections offer bonus sites near the originals. Going to the Cornish Colony Museum in Windsor, Vt.? Don’t miss the Cornish-Windsor covered bridge, which Traute calls the longest in the United States.