Monterey's Cannery Row was made world-famous by celebrated author John Steinbeck, and the reality of the "Row" is every bit as fascinating as Steinbeck's fictionalized portrait. Where Have All the Sardines Gone? has been described as the most complete pictorial history ever assembled of Cannery Row, Fisherman's Wharf, and Monterey's famed sardine industry. Featuring 200 photographs (many of them never before published) along with an informative text, this books brings to life the captivating era when Monterey was known as the Sardine Capital of the World.

Softcover
168 pages, illustrated $9.95

Even though the bubble that was Monterey's mighty sardine industry began to deflate after the peak year of 1945, a second chapter in the colorful life along the Monterey waterfront began to take shape in that very same year. Among other events that marked 1945 as a year to remember on the Monterey Peninsula was the publication of a book called Cannery Row by the Salinas-born author John Steinbeck. (The community of Salinas is approximately twenty miles east of Monterey.) Internationally known in the field of literature, and locally known as a man who enjoyed "the good life," Steinbeck's story of the color and characters along what was then Ocean View Avenue became so popular, and focused so much attention on the mile-long stretch of corrugated tin, tilted smokestacks and eye-catching walkways high along the street, that the City of Monterey (in 1953) officially changed the name of the cannery-lined street to Cannery Row.

With Steinbeck's book immortalizing the Row as "a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia" and "a dream," it was inevitable that the curious would come to take a look for themselves. Such landmark sites as Doc Rickett's Lab, Wing Chong's Market, the overgrown lot where Mack and the boys dreamed the days away and, of course, the popular Lone Star where Flora and the girls practiced the "oldest profession," all became known and revered sites to lovers of Steinbeckian lore. With the tourists coming in ever increasing numbers, and the sardines staying away in equally increasing numbers (the comeback years of 1949-50 being the exceptions), the business-oriented people of Monterey began looking toward the silver of the coins spent by the visitors, rather than the silver of the sardine that for so many years meant prosperity and security to the people of the Peninsula . . .