Michelle Souliere, owner of the Green Hand Bookstore, carries a stack of books to the shelves in Portland, Maine, on Thursday. (AP photo)

NEW YORK — With deep knowledge of Stephen King’s books and curiosity about their inspirations, writer Sharon Kitchens began a journey around Maine. As she learned about the real-life settings and people behind such fiction as “IT” and “Salem’s Lot,” she arranged them into an online map and story she called “Stephen King’s Maine.”

“It was amateur hour, in a way,” she says. “But after around 27,000 people visited the site one of my friends said to me, ‘You should do something more with this.'”

Published in 2024, the resulting book-length edition of “Stephen King’s Maine” is among hundreds released each year by The History Press. Now part of Arcadia Publishing, the 20-year-old imprint is dedicated to regional, statewide and locally focused works, found for sale in bookstores, museums, hotels and other tourist destinations. The mission of The History Press is to explore and unearth “the story of America, one town or community at a time.”

The King book stands out if only for its focus on an international celebrity. Most History Press releases arise out of more obscure passions and expertise, whether Michael C. Gabriele’s “The History of Diners in New Jersey,” Thomas Dresser’s “African Americans of Martha’s Vineyard” or Clem C. Pellett’s “Murder on Montana’s Hi-Line,” the author’s probe into the fatal shooting of his grandfather.

Getting the story right

History Press authors say they like the chance to tell stories that they believe haven’t been heard, or were told incorrectly.

Brianne Turczynski is a freelance writer and self-described “perpetual seeker of the human condition” who lives outside of Detroit and has an acknowledged obsession with “Poletown,” a Polish ethnic community uprooted and dismantled in the 1980s after General Motors decided to build a new plant there and successfully asserted eminent domain. In 2021, The History Press released Turczynski’s “Detroit’s Lost Poletown: The Little Neighborhood That Touched a Nation.”

“All of the journalist work that followed the story seemed to lack a sense of closure for the people who suffered,” she said. “So my book is a love letter to that community, an attempt for closure.”

Kitchens has followed her King book with the story of an unsolved homicide, “The Murder of Dorothy Milliken, Cold Case in Maine.” One of her early boosters, Michelle Souliere, is the owner of the Green Hand Bookstore in Portland and herself a History Press writer. A lifelong aficionado of Maine history, her publishing career, like Kitchens’, began with an online posting. She had been maintaining a blog of local lore, “Strange Maine,” when The History Press contacted her and suggested she expand her writing into a book.

“Strange Maine: True Tales from the Pine Tree State” was published in 2010.

“My blog had been going for about 4 years, and had grown from brief speculative and expressive posts to longer original research articles,” she wrote in an email. “I often wonder how I did it at all — I wrote the book just as I was opening up the Green Hand Bookshop. Madness!!! Or a lot of coffee. Or both!!!”