Soul of a Port Author Leah Dobkin to Speak Tonight, Plus New Books from Aracadia

Tonight (10/13, 7 PM) is our event with Leah Dobkin, author of Soul of a Port: The History and Evolution of the Soul of Milwaukee. The Journal Sentinel wrote up the preview in Sunday's Cue section. Should be an interesting talk.

Soul of a Port is published by History Press, which has already published a number of Milwaukee books, most recently Robert Tanzilo's The Milwaukee Police Bomb of 1917. The folks who started this press (a national operation that specializes in regional titles) came from Arcadia, which as a similar publishing philosophy, only they specialize in photo archives.

Arcadia and History press fill the void lost when such regional publishers as Trails Books, Prairie Oak Press, and NorthWord disappeared. We're also feeling the loss of the Milwaukee County Historic Society's publishing program, which went on hiatus during their headquarters renovation.

There are actually four new Arcadia books out of interest to Milwaukeeans. In alphabetical order, we have:

Milwaukee's Historic Bowling Alleys, by Manya Kaczkowski

Milwaukee Movie Theaters, by Larry Widen (I'm not sure, but I think this is similar to the Lulu Press title we were selling several years ago).

The Swiss in Greater Milwaukee, by Maralyn Wellauer-Lenius

Whitefish Bay, by Thomas H. Fehring

Can you guess which title is selling for us? See our comments section for the answer.

Next March Arcadia publishes Maritime Milwaukee, which covers much of the same territory of Soul of a Port. I guess this can happen when you've got two aggressive publishing programs going on.