Introducing a photo album of a book from a couple who lived in Monterey 100 years ago.

Julianne Burton-Carvajal has assembled a pictorial history book that looks and feels as intimate as a photo album. In a way, that it exactly what it is. But it's more than that.

Artists' Honeymoon: Rowena Meeks Abdy & Harry Bennett Abdy at Work & Play in Monterey & Beyond 1910-1920 is a chronicle of the Monterey Peninsula and San Juan Bautista from a century ago, preserved in the couple's own photographs, paintings and words.

The book is divided among four parts. The first is a photo essay on the couple, their background, and the period setting of the Monterey Peninsula. Part 2 is made up of the "honeymoon album" that the title refers to, pages and pages of the couple's photographs of the Peninsula with captions Burton-Carvajal gleaned from their notes.

Part 3 is brief; selected paintings by Rowena and friends Armin Hansen, Charles Rollo Peters and E. Charlton Fortune. The final "chapter" rounds up miscellanea information, an inventory of envelopes and notations, exposition, bios, a map, sources and endnotes.

But the bulk of the book's content is comprised of 162 previously unpublished photographs, culled from Pat Hathaway's discovery and purchase of 570 negatives on eBay. Once he understaood what he had, he contacted Burton-Carvajal, an author, editor, scholar and curator, and convinced her to reconstruct the story of the couple roving across the local landscape.

She had been working on the Old Monterey Business Association and Monterey History and Art Association new annual project called Art in the Adobes. But this year, the third, after previous bouts of low turnout, she sat out the festival and decided to take up Hathaway's challenge, doing the research and raising the money ($24,000) to push the book into being.

"There's nothing else like it in the history of books on Monterey," she says. "It really is a window inside of the lives of people in the Monterey Peninsula Art Colony. I put together the story of their lives and their neighborhood."

The couple had a decade-long honeymoon, free of children and financed with money from an inheritance left to Rowena, during which they trekked all over the Peninsula, San Juan Bautista, San Francisco, Mill Valley, all the way down to San Diego.

She painted. He wrote. They both took photographs: of painters in the outdoors, of Rowena in the resplendent gardens of Hotel Del Monte, of Armin Hansen and E. Charlton Fortune, of Casa Castro (now the Monterey Museum of Art-La Mirada) sitting by El Estero lagoon accompanied only by two lone trees, of Fisherman's Wharf and idyl countryside. There are photos of former Chinatown, of Seaside, of barren Point Lobos and windswept Pebble Beach.

They took a trip by boat along the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio rivers with Armin Hansen. Harry wrote a book in 1917 about that sojourn called On the Ohio. Rowena illustrated it.

There are photos of the two of them together as their Arts and Crafts-style "dream home" of Forest Haven is being built. In a photo captioned "taking precautions during the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918" Rowena is pictured wearing a surgical mask.

The photos alone prove an interesting trip back in time, but Burton-Carvajal's notations and captions add crucial context.

"On the heels of the American takeover in 1846, the city lost a substantial portion of its population to the gold rush of 1848 and San Francisco's consequent explosion into prominence," she writes of Monterey's slow and quiet growth.

Burton-Carvajal previously edited the book The Monterey Mesa: Oldest Neighborhood in California, compiling the writings of people both living, like Steve Hauk, and gone, like Gouverneur Morris, and turning again to photos from Pat Hathaway's deep archive to illustrate it.

"It sold out in 2 years," she says. "People ask me for it still. [Artists' Honeymoon] will become much beloved by people who care about this region. It's a book for browsing."

It's set for a launch party 2-4pm Saturday at Casa Serrano (412 Pacific St., Monterey) sponsored by the Old Monterey Foundation and the Monterey History & Art Association, with music, dancing, champagne, tea and sweets, and free copies of the book awarded to the man and woman best dressed in 1915's style garb. Call 915-4900 for more information.