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We are very pleased to announce the addition to the
list of books that we supply of this most wonderful volume by our
friend Lucia del Sol Knight and Tom's brother
Daniel Bruce MacNaughton
called The Encyclopedia of Yacht Designers. This is a
truly enormous volume of great weight both physically and from the
point of view of the scholarship involved, which has been many years
in the researching and writing, and has been recently published in a
stunning beautiful volume with a quality of photo and drawing
reproduction which we have never seen equaled. We are very
proud to know Lucia and be related to Dan as we are sure that this
book will be considered to be one of the great works in the history
of marine publishing. The Encyclopedia will clearly be a major
and essential work for the true marine bibliophile. We are
very pleased to be able to sell copies to you. Even with each entry kept as concise as can reasonably convey a good sense of the particular designer, this is an enormous work. After many years of research the book ends up containing biographies of 525 designers. An attempt was made to include every designer who either had a surviving body of work or who had contributed to the advancement of the field in some way. So far every designer we have spontaneously thought to look up has been included. Without fail, even on those designers with whom your reviewer is personally acquainted, I learned things I had not known before. Unfortunately there have had to be a few omissions among living designers as the Lucia and Dan did not want to include an entry without giving these designers the chance to have some input on their entry and some simply never responded. Even in such an enormous and truly encyclopedic work inevitably everyone will have something that they want which could not be fit in. As it is this is a volume so large and heavy that one thinks of having a stand built for it as you would with a huge dictionary. Personally I would like to have seen more pictures of the designers. However having said that, would I have been willing to give up even one of the existing pictures of yachts or their drawings to add these pictures? No I would not, and I know the room taken by the copious photos and drawing reproductions and the acquisition of the rights to reproduce them was very costly. I would also have liked to have information on where to see the work of designers of the past and contact information for living designers. However contact information changes and in these days of web sites it is probably best that this information be maintained on line. I'm sure that if anyone has a problem finding the work of any of these designers they will be able to contact Lucia at www.eyd.net and will be able to get the information that they need. One might have a tendency to discount the reviewer's enthusiasm for this volume since his brother was one of the two creators of this massive and impressive work. However I assure you that I would not urge this book on our readers just because it was written by people whom we know. To get on our web site at all a book has to be one with which we are in substantial agreement and which we feel is truly valuable to our readers. It is a measure of how impressive this book is that having only had our copy for a few weeks we count it one of our three most precious volumes. The other two being Architectura Navalis Mercatoria by Fredrik Henrik af Chapman, originally published in the 1700s and Lines by Olin Stephens, both of which are now out of print. So out of our three favorite books this is the only one that you can get a copy of brand new! You will treasure this book and spend many happy hours reading in it and thinking about the designers so beautifully written about within its covers. (tm) 530 pages, profusely and beautifully illustrated. $250.00 |