Recently in Princeton Authors

Architect Joel Barkley *93 has designed stunning homes inspired by a wide range of styles. Some of his most impressive projects — from a stately, Colonial Revival country house in New Jersey (pictured below) to a Hawaiian beach retreat and a sleek Manhattan loft — are featured in a new book, Houses (The Monacelli Press). One of the founding partners of Ike Kligerman Barkley, an architectural and interior design firm with offices in New York City and San Francisco, Barkley spoke with PAW’s Katherine Federici Greenwood about his work and his bees.

The architect Robert A.M. Stern calls Ike, Kligerman, and Barkley “modern traditionalists” who “build for the here and now but are at home in architecture’s history, from which their work gains its strength.” 

In 1949 Art and Nan Kellam — an aviation engineer and his wife — decided to leave “civilization” and seek a simpler life, on an uninhabited island off the Maine coast. They bought 550-acre Placentia Island and lived there together until 1985, without electricity. They built their house and would row two miles to Bass Harbor to get supplies and mail. Peter P. Blanchard III ’74 first met Nan in 1987, two years after her husband had died. Blanchard was a volunteer with Maine’s chapter of The Nature Conservancy, to which the Kellams had given their island. (Nan died in 2001.) Blanchard recently wrote We Were An Island: The Maine Life of Art & Nan Kellam (University Press of New England), drawing on Nan’s journal, an unpublished manuscript the couple had written about their adventure, and their letters and correspondence. Blanchard spoke with PAW’s Katherine Federici Greenwood.

The author: Todd, who has worked as an environmental attorney, an environmental scientist, and cattle rancher, began collecting oral histories in 1997, when he realized that many key figures in Texas conservation efforts were getting older. Over 11 years, he traveled around the state talking to conservationists — advocates, farmers, politicians, landowners, journalists, medical doctors, environmental attorneys, scientists, engineers, and agency officials — recording hundreds of interviews totaling some 400 hours.  

New book: Benjamin and Bumper to the Rescue, by Molly Coxe ’81, photographs by Olivier Toppin (BraveMouse Books)

The author: The author and illustrator of 10 other children’s books, Coxe loved to draw whimsical characters as a child and wrote her thesis for the English department on the synergy between the illustrations and text in Oliver Twist. She made the stuffed animal characters and designed the miniature sets for Benjamin and Bumper to the Rescue, the debut book of the tiny publishing company she and her husband, Craig Canine ’81, started last year. “Our headquarters,” she notes, “is a one-room studio Craig built in the woods outside of our house on Orcas Island,” north of Seattle.

Robert Masello '74

New book: Blood and Ice, by Robert Masello ’74 (Bantam Dell)