Each month publishers send regional books unsolicited to the Bangor Daily News in hopes of garnering some free ink. The books, either about Maine or of related areas, come in all sizes and prices, and vary in quality. Some, like the three recent titles outlined below, are above average.

MAINE ALMANAC AND BOOK OF LISTS, compiled and published by Maine Times (149 pages, $5.95), combines readability with utility, answering such questions as: How many towns do not allow the sale of alcohol? Which school copped the Boys Class L Basketball championship in 1922? And, name the vehicle that outnumbers all others on Maine highways. (Answers: 26, South Portland, and the Ford Escort.) Plaudits to Maine Times for lively trivia that is anything but trivial.

GREAT WALKS: Acadia National Park & Mount Desert (67 pages, Great Walks, Box 410, Goffstown, N.H. 03045, $5.95 plus $2 postage and handling), is a knapsack-sized guidebook that lives up to its name. Follow the directions and you may find yourself standing in the Asticou Terraces and Thuya Garden, or on trails leading to Beech Mountain and Beech Cliffs. Publisher John Whitney said this is the first in a series of Great Walks guides to the best walks in the world. “A great walk is on a smooth, gently graded trail, can easily be walked in less than a day and features consistently beautiful and interesting scenery,” he wrote. Fine color photos enliven the book.

TIDAL LIFE: A Natural History of the Bay of Fundy (167 pages, Camden House/Harrowsmith, 204 Ferry Road, Charlotte, Vt. 05445, $29.95 plus $1.75 postage and handling), is the coffee-table-book-that-wasn’t. The simple prose of Harry Thurston, a biologist who grew up near Nova Scotia’s Chebogue, a tidal river that empties into the Bay of Fundy, is as alluring as the exquisite color photographs of wildlife ecologist Stephen Homer. Both assure that the slickly packaged book won’t lie around the living room unread.

Anyone who has ever plied Fundy’s turbulent waters on the Bluenose ferry from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, will want to read about the bay’s migrating shorebirds, its humpback whales, its schools of herring and shad, and its people who subsist on the sea. Thurston and Homer make an impassioned plea for the preservation of an ecosystem that is threatened by pollution and overfishing.