Exploring and Mapping Alaska

This book is an English translation and revision of Alexey Postnikov’s Russian America in Geographical Descriptions and Maps, 1741–1867, first published in St. Petersburg in 2000. The eighteen-year effort to publish this book in English is a testament to both scholarly endurance and international collaboration. It is also a fitting memorial to two distinguished scholars from the University of Alaska Fairbanks—Richard A. Pierce and Lydia Black—who devoted their lives to educating the English-speaking world about Russian America. From 1972 until his death in 2004, Dick Pierce was a one-man publishing dynamo. As editor and publisher (as well as copyboy, typist, and mailroom clerk) of Limestone Press, he published, on average, about two books a year—mostly translations of otherwise inaccessible materials concerning the Russian era of Alaska history. Pierce’s no-frills style meant that he published books as cheaply as possible. Illustrations often had the muddy quality of a second-generation Xerox copy and no money was wasted on dust jackets or book designers! He valued the content of his titles instead of the paper they were printed on.

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