Shore Chronicles

For millions of people, summer means travelling to the New Jersey Shore. Every generation brings a new perspective and a new sense of discovery to this beloved region. Every visitor returns home with tales of their experience along this 127 mile long sandy coastline of boardwalks and beaches.

At the dawn of the new millennium, Shore Chronicles: Diaries and Traveler's Tales From the Jersey Shore 1764-1955 enlightens contemporary shore-lovers with fascinating historical perspective. Illustrated with 50 historic photographs, etchings and fine art images, this comprehensive collection begins with adventure travel in 1764 when the shore (and much of New Jersey) was still a wild frontier. The book concludes in 1955 with the opening of the Garden State Parkway, which brought exponentially more visitors - and rapid development - to the Jersey Shore.

A total of 50 accounts comprise the book. Writing by such well-known figures as John J. Audubon, Walt Whitman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen Crane and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is included. But, perhaps most interesting are the selections from private journals, letters, and diaries from unknowns vacationing or visiting the shore.

As fresh as their experiences are to shore visitors each year, most activities here are timeless — the fundamental attractions of the seashore resonate throughout time. Yet it is stunning to read how different the landscape and environment was before development.

Edited by Margaret Thomas Buchholz, who is co-author (with Larry Savadove) of Great Storms of the Jersey Shore , with a foreword from renowned New Jersey historian John T. Cunningham.

Shore Chronicles joins two other acclaimed Jersey Shore literary anthologies published by Down The Shore Publishing — Shore Stories: An Anthology of the Jersey Shore , a collection of contemporary writing, and Under A Gull's Wing: Poems and Photographs of the Jersey Shore — in a trilogy of extraordinary writing about this region.