Bookstore

All profits from bookstore sales support our non-profit organization. Purchasing a book about Humboldt County History, gifts, or ephemeral items from our bookstore is a great way to support the work we do!

Back issues of the Humboldt Historian are available in the bookstore or by phone order. Due to the wide variation in shipping and handling costs, issues cannot be purchased online. Please call (707) 445-4342 during open hours to place your order. Bulk discounts are available!

We do have a selection of used books which are not included on the website. If you’re looking for a particular book, please give us a call. We’ll be happy to check the shelves for you! We mail books out on the Friday following your order.

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Book of the Month - November 2024
Two Peoples, One Place
$23.95 - 20% off the regular price of $29.95
One of the best overall histories of Humboldt County, with a significant emphasis on local indigenous peoples.

 

Lighthouses of Humboldt County

Lighthouses of Humboldt County

from $22.49

By Julie Clark. The impenetrable coast of Humboldt County has been a historic navigational conundrum for sea captains since the 16th century. The Humboldt bar crossing, the lack of safe harbors, the storms, the unpredictable seas, and the rocky shores caused tragic shipwrecks, drownings, and maritime disasters. Beginning in 1850, the Department of the Treasury funded the construction of eleven lighthouses in California, including the Humboldt Harbor Lighthouse. Others were built as the population increased, causing a reliance on passenger schooners and freight vessels. Read their story in this book!

Author Julie Clark works for the Bureau of Land Management as a park ranger and is also the author of Falk: Company Lumber Town of the American West.

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Like all the books in the Arcadia series, it is illustrated with some 200 historic photographs accompanied by deeply informative captions.  Together they detail our coastal history from its rocky, foggy  beginnings to the present.  They cover the perils and personalities of early seafaring, the numerous wrecks along our treacherous shores, the siting and building of lighthouses and their equipping, and the lonely lives of the families that staffed them. It also touches on other aspects of coastal safety such as the wartime Coast Guard patrols.

        For a community whose development was initially based on maritime transportation, this subject is historically vital and continues to be so now that the old lighthouses are now largely tourist attractions or the goal of a Sunday trek to the ruins of the Punta Gorda lighthouse, an open house at the Trinidad light or the memories of the hippy colony at Lighthouse Ranch.

        Altogether, this is an enlightening look at Humboldt's coastal history.