World of the Oregon Fishboat: A Study in Maritime Folklife

Originally published in a limited cloth edition in 1986, this reissue of The World of the Oregon Fishboat brings an important and lively book to a wider audience.

Here, in an easily-read narrative, Janet Gilmore describes life in the Coos Bay community of Charleston, based upon her years of interviewing and research. She recounts a precarious lifestyle, but one filled with tradition. Oregon fishboats, and the fishermen who work on them, have been a mainstay of the Northwestern way of life. Now, as Gilmore notes both in her narrative and in the new introduction to this edition, that way of life is dramatically changing. In the process, the fishboats used by Oregon's commercial fishermen are also changing. The World of the Oregon Fishboat records a way of life as it was in the late 1970s as it focuses on the fisherman's vessel--which serves as vehicle, shelter, home, and companion.

The World of the Oregon Fishboat is both an elegant recording of an important aspect of twentieth century American life and a compassionate plea to understand a world of work that most of us rarely contemplate.