NEW YORK — With deep knowledge of Stephen King’s books and curiosity about their inspirations, writer Sharon Kitchens began a journey around Maine. As she learned about the real-life settings and people behind such fiction as “IT” and “Salem’s Lot,” she arranged them into an online map and story she called “Stephen King’s Maine.”
“It was amateur hour, in a way,” she said. “But after around 27,000 people visited the site one of my friends said to me, ‘You should do something more with this.’”
Published in 2024, the resulting book-length edition of “Stephen King’s Maine” is among hundreds released each year by The History Press. Now part of Arcadia Publishing, the 20-year-old imprint is dedicated to regional, statewide and locally focused works, found for sale in bookstores, museums, hotels and other tourist destinations. The mission of The History Press is to explore and unearth “the story of America, one town or community at a time.”
The King book stands out if only for its focus on an international celebrity. Most History Press releases arise out of more obscure passions and expertise, whether Michael C. Gabriele’s “The History of Diners in New Jersey,” Thomas Dresser’s “African Americans of Martha’s Vineyard” or Clem C. Pellett’s “Murder on Montana’s Hi-Line,” the author’s probe into the fatal shooting of his grandfather.
A home for history buffs
Like Kitchens, History Press authors tend to be regional or local specialists — history lovers, academics, retirees and hobbyists. Kitchens’ background includes writing movie press releases, blogging for the Portland Press Herald and contributing to the Huffington Post. Pellett is a onetime surgeon who was so compelled by his grandfather’s murder that he switched careers and became a private investigator. In Boulder, Colorado, Nancy K. Williams is a self-described “Western history writer” whose books include “Buffalo Soldiers on the Colorado Frontier” and “Haunted Hotels of Southern Colorado.”
The History Press publishes highly specific works such as Jerry Harrington’s tribute to a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor from the 1930s, “Crusading Iowa Journalist Verne Marshall.” It also issues various series, notably “Haunted” guides that publishing director Kate Jenkins calls a “highly localized version” of the ghost story genre. History Press has long recruited potential authors through a team of field representatives, but now writers such as Kitchens are as likely to be brought to the publisher’s attention through a national network of writers who have worked with it before.
“Our ideal author isn’t someone with national reach,” Jenkins said, “but someone who’s a member of their community, whether that’s an ethnic community or a local community, and is passionate about preserving that community’s history. We’re the partners who help make that history accessible to a wide audience.”
The History Press is a prolific, low-cost operation. The books tend to be brief — under 200 pages — and illustrated with photos drawn from local archives or taken by the authors themselves. The print runs are small, and authors are usually paid through royalties from sales rather than advances up front. History Press books rarely are major hits, but they can still attract substantial attention for works tailored to specific areas, and they tend to keep selling over time.
Editions selling 15,000 copies or more include “Long-Ago Stories of the Eastern Cherokee,” by Lloyd Arneach, Alphonso Brown’s “A Gullah Guide to Charleston” and Gayle Soucek’s “Marshall Field’s,” a tribute to the Chicago department store.
The King guide, which has sold around 8,500 copies so far, received an unexpected lift — an endorsement by its subject, who was shown the book at Maine’s Bridgton Books and posted an Instagram of himself giving it a thumbs-up.
“I was genuinely shocked in the best possible way,” Kitchens said, adding that she saw the book as a kind of thank-you note to King. “Every choice I made while writing the book, I made with him in mind.”
Getting the story right
History Press authors say they like the chance to tell stories that they believe haven’t been heard, or were told incorrectly.
Rory O’Neill Schmitt is an Arizona-based researcher, lecturer and writer who feels her native New Orleans is often “portrayed in a way that feels false or highlights a touristy element,” like a “caricature.” She has responded with such books as “The Haunted Guide to New Orleans” and “Kate Chopin in New Orleans.”
Brianne Turczynski is a freelance writer and self-described “perpetual seeker of the human condition” who lives outside of Detroit and has an acknowledged obsession with “Poletown,” a Polish ethnic community uprooted and dismantled in the 1980s after General Motors decided to build a new plant there and successfully asserted eminent domain. In 2021, The History Press released Turczynski’s “Detroit’s Lost Poletown: The Little Neighborhood That Touched a Nation.”
“All of the journalist work that followed the story seemed to lack a sense of closure for the people who suffered,” she said. “So my book is a love letter to that community, an attempt for closure.”
Kitchens has followed her King book with the story of an unsolved homicide, “The Murder of Dorothy Milliken, Cold Case in Maine.” One of her early boosters, Michelle Souliere, is the owner of the Green Hand Bookstore in Portland and herself a History Press writer. A lifelong aficionado of Maine history, her publishing career, like Kitchens’, began with an online posting. She had been maintaining a blog of local lore, “Strange Maine,” when The History Press contacted her and suggested she expand her writing into a book.
“Strange Maine: True Tales from the Pine Tree State” was published in 2010.
“My blog had been going for about 4 years, and had grown from brief speculative and expressive posts to longer original research articles,” she wrote in an email. “I often wonder how I did it at all — I wrote the book just as I was opening up the Green Hand Bookshop. Madness!!! Or a lot of coffee. Or both!!!”
Story by Hillel Italie.
