Coffee Table Book of: Wooden Boats (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Wooden Boats is a large-format coffee table book about traditional wooden boats, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two.

It begins in the shed, with a hull going up: oak frames standing in rows like ribs, a rib bent over its form still damp from the steam box, planks lapped in clinker or laid flush in carvel, cotton half driven into a seam, a copper rivet clenched over its rove, a hull planked halfway up its sides on the stocks, and a carved half model on its backboard.

Then it comes close: a bronze cleat on a teak deck, an oarlock in a worn gunwale, a spoked wheel and a brass binnacle, a hatch cover under many coats of varnish, a round porthole, a block and its sheave, a rope laid in a flat spiral on deck, belaying pins at the foot of a mast, deadeyes laced with a tarred lanyard, and a red-brown tanbark sail furled along its boom.

Then the yard: a workbench running the length of a shed wall, a spokeshave among pale shavings, an adze and a broadaxe against a squared oak log, boats laid up for winter under canvas in the snow, a marine railway running down into still water, and a racing shell resting upside down along a boathouse wall.

Then out on the water, and into its weather: moorings at first light, a schooner under full sail near a hazy horizon, a yawl ghosting across glassy water, a punt among lily pads, a harbour in thick sea fog, a ketch under shortened sail beneath a storm sky, low sun glowing through a cotton sail, and a single anchor light in the rigging on a moonlit bay.

It ends with age and repair: the ribs and keel of an old boat lying the length of a salt marsh, a new pale plank let into dark weathered planking, a hull scraped back to bare wood, and layer on layer of old paint flaking from a working boat’s plank.

Short notes run through the book. They are about the boats rather than about the pictures: which way a boat on its mooring swings, how to tell a ketch from a yawl and what makes a schooner, how sea fog forms, and how a wooden hull is kept going a plank or a frame at a time.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.