"The mandate of the press before that was to be printing scholarly publications for exchange with other museums," said Blair Colliss, the press's new director. "The museum needed to build up its collection and didn't have a lot of money for acquisitions."

About 90 years of publishing followed, in more recent years using outside presses for the actual printing. The flow slowed to a trickle and then stopped about six years ago.

What better time for a rebirth than a centennial year?

And so about six weeks ago, the museum publishing house started drumming up business again with "Arts and Crafts of Hawaii" ($34.95 hardbound, $29.95 paper), a reprint of a 1957 opus by the late Sir Peter Buck, the museum's third director.

It detailed the methods for creating all manner of Hawaiian handicrafts, the construction of everything from thatched roofing to feather capes.

Conveying such skills to the next generation had been an oral tradition, said "Aunty" Pat Namaka Bacon, a cultural specialist at the museum who typed up much of the original manuscript.

"If a grandparent had a special skill, he always would look for a grandchild who was extra-smart, because he could learn it," she said.

Buck hired Bacon for her first post at the museum, as a telephone operator. Back in 1939, she said, the switchboard had one line for incoming calls that she'd patch to one of 12 extensions.

"There were many moments when the line would be tied up and I could type," she recalled with a laugh. "That's how I got involved with typing the rough draft."

Buck, of Maori and Irish ancestry and a native New Zealander, had some knowledge of Pacific arts through his anthropological studies. But he had come to anthropology through medicine, Bacon said, so perhaps it wasn't surprising that he took a somewhat surgical approach to determining the construction of some works.

"He would pull things out of the collection and take them apart — not the important pieces — describe them and put them back," she said.

Seven years later, the press began publishing individual chapters as separate paperbound issues on each craft, but the single hardbound volume has been out of print for years, Colliss said.

It seemed a worthy product to reissue, but the museum never realized how much of a demand there was. Most of the first press run of about 2,000 copies sold out soon after they hit bookstores in October, and another 3,000 were ordered and should be on the shelves in about a week, he said.

"Hopefully, this will be the beginning," Colliss said. "We're looking at about 30 books for next year, but we will probably boil it down to about 12."

Next up is "Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors: Reviving Polynesian Voyaging," by Ben Finney, a retired University of Hawai'i anthropology professor who founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

That's due out Friday, and there's a string of other works to follow, from children's books in Hawaiian and English to a bilingual work on fishing lore.

But Colliss said the most excitement has been generated by another pioneer effort: a treatise on lua, the Hawaiian martial art.

"It's an extremely difficult book to put together because of the sensitivity of the material," he said. "Our target date is March."

The reading public is already beating down the door, he added, which is a somewhat stressful but enviable position for a publisher to be in. "I just got a call from a bookstore in Arizona demanding a publication date," he said. "People from outside the state are knowing about it."