Marjory Potts met Frances Perkins purely by accident. Buried in books at the Vineyard Haven Library, researching an article she was writing about another subject, she came across a biography of Ms. Perkins, and all but lost interest in the subject at hand.

Ms. Perkins was the Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Roosevelt, and the first female member of the U.S. Cabinet. In her day, she was perceived as a serious figure, even grim. But as Mrs. Potts would quickly discover, she was actually anything but.

Growing up, Grace Potter always had a strong taste for celebrity. She remembers wishing she’d some day just morph into Ariel, of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. When it started to look as if coronation was out of the question, she embarked on another path to fame, joining up with some college buddies to form the band Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.

It’s a quiet Friday in Stina Sayre’s tiny clothing store, near the Black Dog Tavern in Vineyard Haven. The quiet is unusual for early August, when tourist foot traffic generally makes it difficult to look forward to any free time in the early afternoon. But the owner and designer makes the best of the downtime, shuffling between clothing patterns and swatches of fabric spread out across a broad table at the back of the room, where her unique designs are born and come to life.

Hardtack and Coffee: Or the Unwritten Story of Army Life. The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War. Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars. Old Nutriment.

These are all titles of books that Seen the Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Gettysburg author John Hough Jr. was encouraged to read in his research for the book. They are not titles that were available at Mr. Hough’s local library in West Tisbury.

But he got them anyway.