The BL required a fee for reproduction rights to their copy, plus a further fee per page to take high-quality scans from it. This all spelled a loss-making new edition. I computed that I may as well try to obtain my own copy and operate without restriction as to quantity and use, and after many months one ‘came up’ – for a considerable price due to its scarcity. The oilcloth binding had clearly been wet at some point, but the interior had escaped this fate somehow, and was, in the jargon of the trade, clean and bright. We were in business.

I like to add some new editorial ‘value’ to my books where possible, and I located a London dealer in the very camera type used by the author; he was able to provide a photo of an example of the camera, which is now in the book. And the British Medical Association’s online Obituary for H. Lewis Jones, who died at only 58 in 1915, soon after the loss of his son in the Great War, provided the source for ‘About the Author’, of whom most of us will have known nothing until now. If I say so myself, Swin, Swale and Swatchway could not possibly be bettered as the inaugural title for “Lodestar Library”.

The sums are not life-changing: 10% on 100 copies of a book costing, currently, £12, will result in very few begging letters for the recipient, who in some cases forwards the money to a good cause anyway. I don’t produce sales reports or royalty statements — life’s too short; instead I pay the royalty in advance on the entire run and am done with it. I expect to produce a handful of titles a year, and already there are people who are ordering them all — a policy to be recommended. To encourage this, and provide a useful saving on postage cost, I’ll probably continue to publish in batches of three, trying in each batch to represent writing from before WW-I, between the wars, and after WW-II. The material may be cruising account, practical instruction (but not too technical), or even fiction, to build on your shelf a valuable body of lesser-known lore and knowledge in the field of traditional sail. If you have any suggestions I’d like to hear from you.

But it’s costly and inefficient for the reader to have to buy all the books to gain the totality of his ideas, hence Cruising Hints, Seventh Edition, for which I bought, begged or borrowed some two dozen Cooke books, scanned some 4,500 pages, and boiled the lot down into 700. My aims were fourfold: To encompass all of Cooke’s practical views and advice, which changed but little as time passed; to include some of his delightful cruising yarns from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods; to include every one of his design commentaries, with drawings, as these are useful reference material; and to ‘catch up’ with some old boats today, with photos and the present owners’ comments. The sheer slog of the research was rewarded by the enjoyment to be had through contact with like-minded people around the world, not to mention Francis B. Cooke’s present-day family. And the book hasn’t fared badly.

I have always had a soft spot for the face, but one should avoid the syndrome where if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Nonetheless it seemed appropriate for Tony Watts’ Holmes of the Humber text — quite “Arts & Craftsy” in feel, and sufficiently different to the close-setting workhorse Miller I used for the Humber Yawl Club articles in that book. But a word to the unwary. I purchased the digital Centaur typeface only to discover for myself what I then found online to be well-known — it’s not very good. If a typeface originally created in metal is copied too accurately for digital or litho reproduction, the printed text suffers from being too ‘spindly’ because it will lack the ‘spread’ of the ink which occurs in letterpress printing. A little research yielded ‘Adobe Jenson Pro’, a redrawing by Adobe’s Robert Slimbach from the original by Nicholas Jenson (1420-1480) (which was the basis for Rogers’ Centaur), but intended for modern reproduction technology by virtue of its ‘built-in’ ink spread. It’s this typeface which you see in the biographical parts of Holmes.