The Summer Island Issue

We begin Volume Zero out at the edge of the map, on an island thirty miles into the Atlantic that you can only reach by boat or by a small plane. Nantucket in July is the summer island in its purest American form: grey cedar shingles gone the colour of driftwood, cobblestones underfoot, and roses swallowing the cottages out at 'Sconset. It is also full, and expensive, and easy to get wrong. So this first issue does the plain work — where to sleep when every bed is spoken for, and how to time a week the whole eastern seaboard seems to want at once.

This issue is built around a single tension. The town, wrapped around its harbour, gives you everything within a short walk and asks a high price for the privilege; 'Sconset, seven miles east, gives you calm and the rose-covered lanes and asks you to travel back for dinner. We came down on the side of paying for the town on a first visit and walking everywhere, and taking a house only when there are enough of you to fill it. You may decide otherwise. We would rather hand you the trade-off than a verdict.

We kept faith with the island's own scale. It rewards one thing done slowly in a day, so this guide keeps to that. One museum to make the town legible — the old candle factory on Broad Street, and the story of the whaleship Essex that fed Moby-Dick. One lighthouse to toss a penny past. One ride out to Madaket for the sunset. The Fourth of July on Main Street and the Boston Pops on the beach in August are here because the island genuinely stops for them, not because a brochure said so.

A word on what this magazine is. Amorielli answers two questions and no others: where to stay, and when to go. No star ratings, no endless lists, no promises we cannot stand behind. Everything in these pages is either general knowledge or checkable against the ferry line, the historical association and the town's own office, and where we were not certain of a name or a number we described the thing rather than inventing it. Welcome to the summer island.

Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief