National Fisherman, which traces its roots to the early twentieth century, has been a critical and influential voice for commercial fisherman and the fishing industry for more than one hundred years. Its editors, reporters, and photographers have chronicled the industry, its growth, and its changes. The magazine, and its predecessor, Atlantic Fisherman, have always focused on commercial fishermen—the industry that surrounds them, the boats they fish, and the gear they rely on to harvest the bounty of the sea.
Atlantic Fisherman was first published in February 1921 and was dedicated to the Atlantic fisher-folk—a “vast army, who contributes so richly to the life-blood of the North American nations.” Atlantic Fisherman moved north to Goffstown, New Hampshire in 1929 and then renamed itself National Fisherman in 1954. It increased its coverage area by adding the Pacific Coast coverage. The name change reflected the fishing industry’s need for a more in-depth magazine that provided a national perspective regarding fishing practices, processing, boat design, regulations, and resources.
For many years, National Fisherman was known as “the saltiest magazine on the newsstand.” While a trade publication, fishermen haven’t been the magazine’s only audience. A good portion of its readers owned pleasure boats, wanted to build their own boats, or were simply interested in the commercial fishing way of life and maritime history. Before the rise of competing magazines, National Fisherman ran articles on such topics as building and repairing small pleasure boats, the latest maritime equipment, and the days when two-, three-, and four-masted schooners ruled the sea.
In 1960, National Fisherman consolidated with Maine Coast Fisherman, a monthly publication that started in 1946 and was based in Belfast, Maine. The merger allowed for even wider coverage of commercial fishing and boatbuilding, while the increased number of pages provided more space to run articles and display photos. National Fisherman, and before that Atlantic Fisherman, were seven-by-eleven-inch publications, but the combined National Fisherman/Maine Coast Fisherman was much larger, measuring eleven-by-seventeen inches.
The cover included both the National Fisherman and Maine Coast Fisherman names until December 1967, when the Maine Coast Fisherman name was dropped. For that same issue, National Fisherman absorbed Pacific Fishing, which was published for sixty-three years out of San Francisco. This allowed National Fisherman to say it presented “the broadest coverage in the industry ever offered to U.S. fishermen.” The magazine’s geographic coverage now included the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts, the Great Lakes, and Alaska.
The period from the late 1960s through the 1990s is considered National Fisherman’s heyday. A measure of its growing importance and influence was the number of pages in each issue. Atlantic Fisherman generally offered a 26-page issue, although it sometimes stretched to 40 pages. The combined National Fisherman/Maine Coast Fisherman issues weren’t much bigger, ranging from 36 to 48 pages, maybe even hitting 64 pages. But National Fisherman was often more than 100 pages, with some Year Book issues running more than 200 pages.
Working the Sea is a collection of more than one hundred of those images, taken from the 1920s to the 1990s.
The images made their way to the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport beginning in 1992 when Gardner Lamson, who had been Atlantic Fisherman’s editor, gave the museum about 1,000 prints from the magazine’s photo files, along with printed copies of Atlantic Fisherman.
National Fisherman’s parent company, Diversified Communications in Portland, donated National Fisherman’s entire pre-digital photographic archive of about 2,100 prints to the museum in 2012. Both of those photo collections have been digitized and cataloged, and most of the images are now available on the museum’s website: penobscotmarinemuseum.org.
