BUFFALO, BOOKS & BEER RETURNS WITH YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN US HOWLING: WHEN BUFFALO RULED THE INLAND SEAS BY JEFF Z. KLEIN & SCOTT A. WOOD

BUFFALO, BOOKS & BEER (B3), the popular barroom reading series, returns Wed., Oct. 15, 7 p.m., at The Buffalo, Bar & Grille (307 Louisiana Street., Buffalo 14204) with Jeff Z. Klein, author of the graphic historical novel, YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN US HOWLING: When Buffalo Ruled the Inland Seas, published in October and illustrated by Scott A. Wood.

Author and journalist Klein will discuss his new book YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN US HOWLING, an illustrated history of the primacy of Buffalo as a port city on the Great Lakes. From the opening of the Erie Canal (200 years ago next month) Buffalo grew to be one of the busiest ports in the nation.

The canal was the catalyst. A colossal engineering achievement and the first commercial link between East and West in the U.S., it waters circulated freight and people, connecting the Great Lakes and the American interior with the Hudson River and Atlantic Ocean at New York City. The throbbing heart of the canal: a raucous port city.

Buffalo’s bustling waterfront was an infamous den of vice populated by hard-drinking sailors who brawled, whored, and sang bawdy sea chanteys. The book is filled with colorfully unforgettable local characters and some of history’s famous figures, such as Herman Melville. Wood’s rich illustrations capture the shades of life on land and the many moods of the brooding Great Lakes, where storms and maritime disasters claimed countless lives lost to their depths.

The book is more than a love letter to a bygone era of schooners and lake freighters that concluded when the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in the middle of the 20^th Century, causing lake traffic to bypass Buffalo. The story traces “… tales of personal human experience through the broader landscape and seascape of political and social history [and] Scott Wood’s marvelous drawings… give the whole work a remarkable aesthetic unity,” according to John Montague, founder of the Buffalo Maritime Center.