"This is a true labor of love, carefully selected, intensively researched, and beautifully written. One has only to open it up to see its quality and scope."
—William David Barry, Maine Sunday Telegram

". . . dozens of compelling photographs of Maine men and women at work, with Bunting's cogent explanatory essays."
—Yankee Magazine

"The author treats each photograph as a time capsule, a window, and an opportunity to see what was happening. . . . He enjoys discovering secrets that lurk before our eyes in the corners of photographs, and interpreting them with traditional archival and oral historical research."
—Rob Napier, Nautical Research Journal

These extraordinary collections of photographs and narrative captions have wide appeal to anyone interested in Maine's past. Spend an afternoon with either volume of A Day's Work, and you'll make discoveries that will change how you look at Maine's passing scene. Bunting has a knack for spotting the unusual in a photograph, or some minor detail that, in fact, tells a major story about the how and why. From granite quarry operations to an itinerant cobbler in a sailing scow to hootchie cootchie dancers at the state fair to deepwater ships, his page-long captions place these images in social and economic context—but this is not dry history. His research has uncovered a wealth of fascinating, often quirky detail (did you know that mummy wrappings were imported from Egypt for Maine papermaking?), and he makes frequent forays into the Maine storytelling tradition.