The Salmon Project will continue its statewide “King of Fish” book drop this Sunday, Oct. 26, at Two Sisters Bakery in Homer. 

Between 9 and 11 a.m., book drop organizers will hand out 100 free copies of “King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon,” by David Montgomery along with $5 vouchers to Two Sisters Bakery. “King of Fish” is about the shared history of humans and salmon over the last millennium, and the book drop aims to stimulate conversations about salmon statewide.

Montgomery was the speaker at Cook Inletkeeper’s 17th annual Splash Bash on July 31 in Homer.

The King of Fish Book Drop is a new initiative of the Salmon Project, a nonprofit dedicated to nurturing the relationships between Alaskans and wild salmon. The book drop will deliver a total of 1,250 copies of “King of Fish” to communities across the state including Homer, Kodiak, Sitka, Petersburg, Fairbanks and Juneau as well as communities in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the Copper River Drainage and the Yukon-Kuskokwim. 

“The goal is for people to read the book, think about it, have conversations about it and then pass it on,” said Erin Harrington, Salmon Project executive director. “The book is also missing something very important: a chapter about Alaska. We want our readers to help us figure out what should go in the unwritten final chapter. To our surprise, many Alaskans have never heard some of these stories. We are a state sustained by salmon, but many of us don’t know the history of this incredible fish that feeds us, gives us jobs and creates a way of life. That’s the driving force behind the King of Fish book drop.”

Montgomery is a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington. He received his bachelor of science in geology at Stanford University and holds a doctorate in geomorphology from the University of California Berkeley.

His books include “The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood” and “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.” 

In 2008, Montgomery was named a MacArthur Fellow and “Dirt” won the Washington State Book Award in General Nonfiction. His work on landscape evolution and the impact of geological processes on ecological systems led him to study the connections, past and present, between humans, salmon and rivers for “King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon.”
 To learn more about the book drop or to request more copies of the book, visit www.salmonproject.org/bookdrop.

For more information on The Salmon Project, visit www.salmonproject.org.