Island Album: Photographs & Memories of Long Beach Island

Like a great family photo album for Long Beach Island, Island Album is a delightful oversize hardcover that will be poured over and shared by the ''family'' of this New Jersey barrier island resort. Here is Long Beach Island in the days of pound fishing and great hotels, but here, too, are individual fishermen showing off their catches and a gaggle of summer waitresses posing for a group picture in their brief spare time. Children of every decade personify summer as they romp on beaches and mess about in boats. Teenagers are teenagers, recognizable at work and play. Houses evolve from simple shanties into Victorian ''cottages'' and finally modern structures with walls of glass. But all are home to the families gathered for the camera on porch and dock. The text, drawn from a series of remarkable interviews taped over a ten-year period, combines descriptions of life on the Island with what the Island represents to those who have known it well. This fragile strip of land between bay and ocean captures the imagination today as much as ever, and this loving evocation of its past will delight those who know, and those who have just discovered, this place apart.