Sand in Their Shoes is described by the editors as "a compendium of true, curious, comical and elevating writings about Cape Cod and Cape Cod people, the best that has appeared in three-hundred-odd years." It is the story of life on Cape Cod told by the people who lived it or observed it at first hand. In its pages you can go a-whaling with young Benjamin Bangs of Harwich in 1743 or, in 1915, share with Susan Glaspell the excitement of a Provincetown summer when a "little theatre" group that was to become world-famous was formed. It is a book to read from beginning to end, following the current of history, or to pick up at random to taste the quality of a moment.

The reader may dip readily into early accounts historians always talk about and few others ever see. John Brereton tells what Cape Cod looked like to him in 1602. Pilgrim writers describe in moving detail the adventures the Pilgrims shared on Cape Cod. Through Colonial days and the Revolution, travelers' accounts, journals, letters, sermons, speeches, newspaper items, tales, bring the record down to our day all with a salty sprinkling of anecdote and verse.

The pieces in the book are the soil of history. In bringing them together the editors have created an imaginative, original, highly readable compendium.