From Grand Manaan to Mount Desert to the Isles of Shoals on the New Hampshire border, sixty-eight light-houses stand along the coast of Maine and her rivers. In his conversational way, Bill Caldwell leads his readers on an historical tour of all the Maine lighthouses. In Bill's hands the legends, lore, and history of the impressive signals come to life. Black and white photos or drawings of individual light-houses in many of the sections add to the experience.Maine's lighthouses are symbolic of her proud maritime heritage and of a way of life that has long passed. Who better to pass on the traditions than master storyteller Bill Caldwell? "Lovers of lighthouses will enjoy this handy, concise guide of the 68 lighthouses along the coast and ... islands of Maine." -- The Shy Librarian "You can imagine Caldwell sitting in a chair and telling these stories directly to you, so conversational is his style." -- York County Coast Star Bill Caldwell was an ardent sailor who wrote many books about Maine. "'Why here? What mad misanthrope chose to build a lighthouse on this hostile, forsaken rock, twenty-six miles offshore in a perilous ocean?' "Mount Desert Rock is exposed to some of the most savage seas and gales of any light on the Atlantic coast. Yet someone picked this place to erect a light to help mariners find the way to Mount Desert Island and Frenchman's and Blue Hill Bays on either side of it. And he ordered that the light be erected upon a rock barely out of the ocean. The rock is a mere chunk of volcanic outcrop, a speck in the wild Atlantic. The nearest harbor is twenty-six miles away on the mainland. "On a calm day, you can walk every yard of this world in a few minutes; it is six hundred yards long and two hundred yards wide. On a calm day you might even feel safe and enjoy the ocean, twenty feet below the highest point on the rock at low tide. "In a storm, however, run fast for cover--the fury of the sea submerges every inch of the rock on which the light stands. The force of those seas is incredible. In a storm of 1842, say federal records, a mammoth rock eighteen feet long, fourteen feet wide, and six feet thick, weighing fifty-seven tons, was hurled by the wild ocean as though it were a toy! In another storm a boulder weighing seventy-five tons was rolled like a hoop sixty feet by gigantic waves. "Sail by Mount Desert Rock Light today and you are glad it is there, but you wonder about the kind of men and women who have been its keepers and how they endured life on this rock for more than 170 years."