#000144
Brunswick and Topsham (Images of America)
Joyce K. Bibber
Part of Arcadia's ubiquitous *Images of America* series, *Brunswick and Topsham* gathers vintage photographs of two linked towns on Maine's Androscoggin River, assembled and captioned by historian Joyce K. Bibber. Bibber, a longtime professor of history at the University of Southern Maine with a deep interest in the region, uses the format to tell the towns' story in pictures — the mills and falls that powered them, the streets and shopfronts, Bowdoin College nearby, and the people who lived and worked there. Like others in the series, it is less a continuous narrative than a curated photo album with informative captions, the kind of book that rewards browsing. For anyone with roots in Brunswick or Topsham, or a fondness for how small New England towns looked a century ago, it is an easy, evocative pleasure.
more…less ▴
The author
Joyce K. Bibber is a professor of history at the University of Southern Maine who has written a number of the Images of America volumes covering her home region, including books on Harpswell and on Bath and West Bath. Her long study of the area gives her captions more historical weight than the format usually carries.
The book
Following the standard Images of America template, the book is built from archival photographs, each captioned to tell a piece of local history. Together they trace Brunswick and Topsham — twin towns facing each other across the falls of the Androscoggin — through their mill economy, civic life, and their long association with Bowdoin College.
How to read it
It is a browser's book rather than a cover-to-cover read, best enjoyed by lingering over the images and their captions. For residents and descendants it doubles as a kind of communal photo album; for outsiders it is a vivid, low-effort window onto a New England mill town's past.
For more context
It complements Bibber's other Maine volumes and the deeper narrative histories of Brunswick, such as William Shipman's architectural study of the town and college.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Joyce K. Bibber
- Publisher
- Arcadia
- Place of publication
- Charleston, South Carolina
- Edition
- Reprint (orig. 1994)
- ISBN
- 0752400819
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine
Places