Not my words, but those of sailor, maritime author and now publisher of The Marine Quarterly, Sam Llewellyn in respect of our books: “These books are just unbelievable. Many, many congratulations on look, production quality, design… you name it. Perfection on legs.” Sentiments I heartily reciprocate regarding his wonderful new journal, of which No 5 is about to appear — I urge you to subscribe for a regular 112 pages of thoughtful and entertaining writing — both old and new — on all aspects of the sea, things that float on it, creatures that live in it, and people who enjoy it or make their living from it. Who Needs a Navy? by Lewis Page, from Issue 1, was a revelation to me as it may be for you also.
For reasons explained elsewhere, Lodestar titles are not generally to be found in bookshops. But a happy exception, for those within reach of the City of London, is the excellent Daunt Books on Cheapside. They are across the street from my day-job (you didn’t think I made a living from Lodestar did you?) so the crippling cost of carriage is eliminated, and manager Ben kindly took a few trial copies today. The City being full of well-read sailors of classic boats, I think it’ll prove a good investment for the shop. Feel free to ask him to obtain any Lodestar title you’d like to look at, I can normally get them there within 24 hours, maybe even the same day.
This will be a revelation to half of you, but blindingly obvious to the other half. When scanning a page from a book or journal, there is a risk that the matter on the reverse of the page, and even on the page after that, will show up in the image and make it unusable. The solution, at any rate for black & white or monochrome originals, is to place a sheet of black paper or card behind the page being scanned. This ‘drowns’ the offending material. Now, instead of text or other material showing through, you get a solid murky grey, which is easy to adjust back to white in any image editing software. A while back I paid a large sum for the British Library to supply a scan of a drawing from an old yachting journal. Because they did not take this precaution I received an unusable image bearing the clear text from the back of the page of interest. Happily they re-did the scan using the above trick, and vowed to standardise on it. We’ll see!
I just found the time to watch Red Sails – a new DVD about Thames sailing barges, which weaves the story of the Cambria’s reconstruction into that of the barge trade as a whole. For those unfamiliar, Cambria was the last barge to trade under sail alone, decommissioned only in 1970 and recently restored from a very shabby state, relaunching in 2011. This is an absolutely cracking production which combines old and new film footage, interviews etc, including scenes of arch-rivals Cabby and Cambria racing once more in 2011 — and boy do they move. I have no connection with the producers, but wish it all the success it richly deserves. You can find it here. There is no Lodestar book on Thames barges yet — but a chance would be a fine thing, let me know if you have an idea for one.
Some of you will be familiar with the 1920s originals by The Bodley Head of three Alker Tripp books, which I am ‘doing’ in the Spring. They were reproduced in facsimile by Conway Press in the 1970s, but somehow I felt they deserved better. The writing and the illustration stand up well, and it would be good if the former flowed more comfortably with less interruption by the latter. This would require a different, larger page format, and here’s the conundrum: The sheer volume of illustration meant that, if I placed it within the notional text area of the book, displacing the text as required, I ran out of text before I had placed all the pictures. It seems the author was ‘in on’ the original edition’s layout and supplied drawings accordingly. My solution was to place the vertically-oriented drawings in a large side margin; this solved the problem, at the same time allowing a more continuous flow of the text, and giving everything in the book more room to breathe than it had in the original charming, but slightly hectic, edition. My aim is to create good new productions, not to slavishly reproduce the old (where’s the fun in that?) so I had no compunction in excluding a few minor and hurried tailpieces from a time when it was thought no space should be left unfilled. Sometimes, less is more.
