Author/Illustrators Gerald and Mark Foster

Gerald Foster

Gerald Foster is an artist, writer, and architect living in Lincoln, Massachusetts. His most recent work includes American Houses (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), a comprehensive 400-page guide to America’s homes and their history with more than 200 illustrations. He co-authored and illustrated A Field Guide to Airplanes with M. R. Montgomery (Houghton Mifflin Co. 1984, 1992, 2004), and wrote and illustrated A Field Guide to Trains (Houghton Mifflin Co. 1996). He also illustrated M. R. Montgomery’s Jefferson and the Gun Men and Black Angus and his paintings appear in Boston-area galleries. Gerry was a vice-president of the former internationally recognized architecture firm, The Architects Collaborative, and continues his own architectural practice. He has a BA in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. Whale Port is Gerry’s first children’s book.

Mark Foster

Mark Foster is a freelance museum exhibit designer and author with a background in the arts, architecture and history. He makes his home in Somerville, MA. He spent eleven years with Museum Design Associates in Cambridge, MA, where his work included Daniel Chester French: A Life in Sculpture for the National Trust and Chesterwood Museum, Stockbridge, MA, Latin Jazz: La Combinacion Perfecta, a traveling exhibition on the history of Latin Jazz for the Smithsonian Institution, and the new Martin Guitar Museum for the Martin Guitar Co. in Nazareth, PA. He assisted in the research for Gerry’s A Field Guide to Airplanes and American Houses. Mark has a BA in history from the University of Massachusetts and did graduate work in American social history at the Harvard Extension School. He pursues his own research on topics in American history, especially early industries and whaling – Whale Port is one of the results.

Origins of Whale Port

Living in New England

Mark and Gerry live in Massachusetts, in New England. If you live in New England you can’t help but hear about whaling. Museums big and small scattered along the coast usually have something about whaling. Then there are the motels, restaurants, and campgrounds that take their names from whales, whaling, or Moby Dick. When Mark was a child Gerry took him to the New Bedford Whaling Museum – Mark still remembers the model whale ship Lagoda, big enough for visitors to walk on, and the huge jaw of a sperm whale with all those giant teeth. Later they visited the Nantucket Whaling Museum with walls covered by harpoons and other whaling tools.

Mark becomes a “Whaling Nerd”

After college, where Mark studied history, Mark got interested in Nantucket. Nantucket was one of America’s most important whaling ports, so he eventually ran into whaling – and got hooked. There were so many interesting things about whaling he couldn’t stop reading: there were tales of adventure as whalemen’s boats were crushed in the jaws of a whale or they visited new lands. There was whaling in our history, from whale hunting by the first European settlers, to the Boston Massacre, the Abolitionist Quakers, and the exploration of the Pacific. And there was the importance of the industry, with hundreds of ships from eighty ports employing tens of thousands – all to provide light for people and lubrication for machines. Finally, there was that strange relationship of human beings and whales that changed from hunting to whale watching. Mark learned so much he began to call himself a “whaling nerd.”

The Idea – and our Favorite Children’s Books

On Saturday mornings Mark and Gerry would meet in the Back Alley Café in Concord and Mark would tell Gerry all about whaling. Gerry got hooked, too. Like Mark, Gerry was interested in American history, especially maritime history. They also liked the children’s books by David Macaulay, especially Cathedral, Castle, and Mill. And Gerry found another book he liked – A Street Through Time, illustrated by Steve Noon, which showed the history of an English street from the stone age to today. One day, they had an idea: a children’s picture book about whaling that showed how a whaling port grew over time.

A Different Kind of Whaling Book

But Gerry and Mark had a problem. There were already hundreds of books on whaling. How could they make a book that was different from the others? What they decided was to make a book about a whaling port, not whaling. And it would be an imaginary port: they would read about the real ports, take what they had in common and combine them, so the imaginary port would be just like a real port. Then they would add people and what they did in a whaling port, so there would pictures of people like Thomas Conklin in his cooper shop, Polly Thompson in her boarding house, or Jeremiah Taber at his oil refinery. And they would squeeze in a history of whaling, too. With a lot of reading and original research, the whaling port of Tuckanucket began to appear, first in Gerry and Mark’s imaginations, then in their writing and drawings, and finally, as the book, Whale Port, A History of Tuckanucket.