FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Mary Lois Timbes traveled to Fairhope last month from her home in Hoboken, N.J., for the paperback launch of her second book about Fairhope, “The Fair Hope of Heaven: A Hundred Years After Utopia.”

She gave a reading Nov. 20 at the Marietta Johnson Museum, where Timbes was a former director, and signed copies Nov. 22 at Page and Palette Bookstore.

“She read from the chapter that highlighted the late Dian Stitt Arnold, an Organic School graduate, horsewoman and one of Fairhope’s memorable characters,” said Maggie Mosteller-Timbes, the museum’s current director.

Close to 25 people attended that reading, including two of Arnold’s children and other relatives. One daughter, Mignon Arnold Bishop, wore her mother’s famous cowboy boots.

“That chapter appeals to me because I think she’s the last of the Fairhope originals,” Timbes said this week, before returning home to Hoboken yesterday, where she moved from Fairhope two years ago to be closer to her daughter and grandsons.

“I have never known anyone as self-aware as Dian, even from an early age,” Timbes writes about Arnold in that chapter. “She sensed what was best for her and somehow found a way to get it.”

Timbes was born in Mobile and moved “over the bay” when she was 10 and grew up in a different Fairhope in the 1950s and ’60s than the town it has become today, she said.

“I was steeped in the actual history and life of ordinary people,” she said. “So, always the interesting thing to me about Fairhope is not that it celebrated eccentrics but that they were totally acceptable. And people like Blanche Brown (in the same chapter with Arnold) didn’t care anything about what people thought of her, and that’s so rare and almost unheard of in Fairhope today.”

Timbes said the Arnold family was “one of the unique families in Fairhope and not in the sense of being eccentric. Dian was the only eccentric who was already pretty much a self-actualized person from an early age. But the whole family was a kind of salt-of-the earth Fairhope family.”

Her second book takes the reader on a tour of the town’s utopian history, and gives compelling portraits of some its founders, unique residents, and famous visitors such as Clarence Darrow and Upton Sinclair.

No matter how much Fairhope might have changed over the years, Timbes said, people are drawn here for similar reasons, even in retirement, to “recreate” themselves, such as that brought the town’s founders seeking this “heaven on earth.”

And there are some things that transcend its current inhabitants that make the place unique, she said, things more rooted by the place it’s located.

“I do think there is a very peaceful atmosphere in Fairhope,” Timbes said. “And a lot of that is due to the bay and to its natural scenic beauty. So, people call it serenity. It’s essentially an unhurried kind of place, and that’s due to the fact that it’s located in the South and also that it’s not really part of another city.”

Timbes speaks unhurriedly about her new home in New Jersey, which is close to Manhattan where she lived for about 15 years during a life whose own chapters have included work as an actress, public relations, historical preservation, as well as being a writer.

“I write a blog that I call ‘Finding Myself in Hoboken’,” she said. “Through that, I’ve learned a lot of the history, because I began writing about certain things I had observed, and people would comment, explaining and telling stories all about it. Like, in the 1950s there were little soda shops and a huge theater where they had rock ‘n’ roll shows. Of course, Frank Sinatra was born and raised there. And it’s a very Italian little place. You can’t walk anywhere without smelling Italian food coming from a restaurant or somebody’s home.”

Timbes said she will be back in Fairhope for an extended visit next year.

“Fairhope may have changed as the world has changed, yet it retains remnants of utopia at its heart,” she says in the last lines of her second book about the place where she grew up.

Mary Lois Timbes’ blog, “Finding Myself in Hoboken,” can be found at: http://myselfinhoboken.blogspot.com.