Island Images, Publishers of Whidbey Island History
by Hugh Brainard

Island Images got it's genesis from a company called The Store. In 1982, we owned a Kaypro computer with memory of 64K, which was plenty for word processing. We had a darkroom and between the two, (computer & darkroom) we had a small business. Lee did copy for The Spindrift (Whidbey Island's own magazine), and I did photographs. We also got into restoring old photos. We soon got better computers, better cameras, and expanded our work.

Our first big project was a book, the By Canoe & Sailing Ship they Came. Dorothy Neil provided all the raw material, Lee put it together and I did the photos. We next expanded into the newspaper business. We started our own community newspaper, The Town Crier. At this time we incorporated under the name of Island Images. We expanded our staff and very soon had more work than we could handle.

The newspaper was taking up all of our time and Lee was working 18 hours a day. We had two choices, to expand again and add more staff to take the load off Lee, or to sell the paper. We decided to sell and devote more time to publishing books. Our company is now down to Lee and I.

Hugh Brainard