Surrender the Ship?

I got stumped last week, trying to catalog a book I’d recently purchased. It was the first full length biography of the American naval hero James Lawrence, and it was supposed to be 244 pages long. However, my copy seemed complete at page 240, which ended with the word “finis.”

I must’ve spent an hour  pouring through my reference books trying to reconcile the discrepancy.

 Meet my friends the reference books – (left to right) BAL, Molnar, Sabin, S&S, Smith II, Howes

I had a dim recollection of the pagination issue being explained to me by the gentleman from whom I’d purchased the book. But I couldn’t remember the details, and I couldn’t piece it together from the bibliographies. So I sent an email to that gentleman, my old friend and customer, Vice Admiral George Emery (see my “Bookman’s Log” entry, April 29 for a review of his excellent book In Their Own Words) who just happened to be an expert on the history of the War of 1812. I told him I needed his help recounting the story of the Lawrence book, that I was stuck, and about to Give Up the Ship. 

Then I went for a walk.

For those of you who have the misfortune (at least during these two marvelous weeks) of not living in New England, I must tell you that the lilacs are in full bloom. And the apple trees. And the impossibly delicate lady slippers, ranging in hue from the deepest purple to pure white.

When you go for a walk in the middle of May in New England, you walk through air redolent with the fragrance of lilacs and apple blossoms. The sun is warm upon your cheek, and the breeze has a playful, innocent quality. Unless, of course, it’s sleeting.

Upon my return I opened George Emery’s email, and there was my answer.

According to a note printed on page 241, the book was already in publication when the last four pages of memorial poems arrived. Publication was halted and the last four pages were bound in. So, this 240 page copy of the scarce biography was, in all probability, even scarcer than its 244 page cousin.

Until the 1950s authorship of the book was attributed to that multi-talented genius Anon. Then a noted American bibliographer named Jacob Blank discovered that the Biography of James Lawrence, esq. had first appeared in the Analectic Magazine, published in Philadelphia, in August, 1813. The editor of the journal at that time was Washington Irving, and Mr. Blank worked out that Irving had written Biography of James Lawrence, esq., - the first book to paint Lawrence as a fallen hero.

This rather obscure bibliographical point came into play yesterday when I got an email from my friend Tom Halstead,  an old state department hand and a veteran of the government’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Tom was alerting me to the fact that he’d just published an article in this week’s Boston Sunday Globe called, “Don’t give up… oh, never mind.” 

The article deconstructs the events behind Lawrence’s historic utterance “Don’t give up the ship!” Halstead comes to the conclusion that “not only did Lawrence’s surviving crew give up the ship almost immediately after his exhortation, but historians and military analysts would later conclude that Lawrence had disobeyed orders to avoid combat in the first place, then committed a series of tactical blunders that all but guaranteed he an his ship would lose.”

He describes the creation of the Lawrence legend as a public relations coup, carried forward with the full support of the American people who “had wanted a victory on June 1, and if they could not have a victory, at least they wanted a hero.”

It’s a fascinating business, this creation of national heroes. No sooner did Britain roll out Nelson’s “Band of Brothers” than we came along with “Preble’s Boys.” At what point, and by what means, does national pride become propaganda?

For now, we'll leave that question to men of experience and wisdom like Tom Halstead and George Emery, both of whom have spent their careers in the service of this country, and who might be expected to have differing interpretations of the facts at hand.

I’ll only add a note about the uncertainty, delicacy, and whimsicality of the process of creating national heroes and legends.

In his ur-biography Washington Irving quotes Lawrence thus: “The brave Lawrence saw the overwhelming danger; his last words, as he was borne bleeding from the deck, were, ‘don’t surrender the ship!’”

Don’t Surrender the Ship?

Halstead told me, “It’s intriguing to speculate how anyone could really know what Lawrence actually said. It could very well have been "Oh, SHIT!" which all his hagiographers felt just wouldn’t do… Consider that once the battle was over and all the American crewmen were bottled up below decks, the one thing the British wanted to do was to get their prize back to Nova Scotia. Nobody is recorded as having escaped, or allowed to go ashore in Boston to tell anyone what happened. The official reports were written from Halifax days later (with no mention of Lawrence's famous last words). All the officers and crew were prisoners, and while the officers may have had some freedom to wander around Halifax I have not found any local newspaper stories that might have told the tale of Lawrence's dying words.”

(Irving, Washington.)   BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES LAWRENCE, ESQ.  LATE A CAPTAIN IN THE NAVY OF THE UNITED STATES: TOGETHER WITH A COLLECTION OF THE MOST INTERESTING PAPERS, RELATIVE TO THE ACTION BETWEEN THE CHESAPEAKE AND SHANNON, AND THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN LAWRENCE, &C., &C.  EMBELLISHED WITH A LIKENESS.  New Brunswick (NJ).  1813.  b/w frontis. 12mo. (5), 6-240 pp. First book edition of Washington Irving’s biography of one of our early naval heroes. (Lawrence’s dying words, as quoted by Irving were, “Don’t surrender the ship!”) This is an interesting variant of a scarce naval (and Washington Irving) item. The bibliographies call for the book to have 244 pages, the final four of which are two poems by Francis Arden memorializing Lawrence. However, at the beginning of the poems there is a notice from the publisher stating that the printing and binding were well along when the Arden poems were received so the presses were stopped until the poems could be added. This is a copy that was bound and released before the poems arrived, making it even more unusual.  Howes I-82 (an “aa” rating). See BAL 10101 for the Irving attribution. Bound in old calf, rebacked, with red spine label. $850

I think I'll go for a walk...

Then and Now

Last Wednesday I gave a talk about the genesis of my new novel The Old Turk’s Load. People laughed. Were they laughing with me or at me? To decide for yourself, click here, then click again on “Greg Gibson.”

The rest of the week was pretty routine. I bought a nice English chart of the Arctic and Pacific (1839) over the phone from another dealer,

and a copy of Scoresby’s “Whaleman’s Adventures,” via email, from the widow of the customer to whom I’d sold it in the 1990s. (That’s been happening a lot, lately. It’s getting to seem as if the ultimate secret to success in this business is outliving your customers.)

I partnered with a book scout, also by telephone, to purchase and sell (I hope) a whaling log, 

and took a few standard titles in pretty bindings on consignment from an old antique dealer pal of mine, with whom I’d talked at the MARIAB Book Fair. 

At the moment I’m busy trying to buy a rare book on Arctic whaling, offered to me in an unsolicited email, from a person in Europe who saw my website but whom I’ve never met. (Yes, he sends it to me first, then I pay him.)

I find it interesting that all these transactions were initiated by mail, telephone, Internet, or by conversations at book fairs. No house calls, no people walking in off the street with books to sell, no scouting other bookshops. Almost no personal contact. Indeed, most of my acquisitions these days come via telephone or email from a network of friends among dealers and scouts, my accumulation of customers over the years, and as a result of my consistent (admittedly amateurish) efforts to establish Ten Pound Island Book Company as an Internet presence.

It hasn’t always been that way.

This morning I found a piece of paper from November 1985, the year before I joined the ABAA. 

It was a partial record of a two day road trip through Massachusetts and Connecticut, buying and selling books. A trip that, for some reason, I can almost remember. No one called me on the telephone or wrote me a letter. If email existed back then, I sure didn’t have it. The business was physical, kinetic, face-to-face. 

Some time in November, 1985, I drove down the Mass Pike and stopped at Roland Boutwell’s in Southbridge, Mass. (Southbridge, as you may know, is east of Northbridge.) He was a minister who had a sad, gray, kind of gravity, more like an undertaker than a minister. But he was a sweet fellow, and he frequently got interesting collections of books, which he’d sell wholesale to the trade. He had a very complicated discount system based, I think, on the price and scarcity of the book, scaled from 20% to 50% and coded with letters and symbols in each book. There was a card available to dealers on which the symbols were decoded. I could never keep it straight. After a while I realized it didn’t matter. If I found a book that interested me, he would price it so I could buy it.

Then on to Irene Wallett’s in Gardner, Massachusetts. She was an unusual woman. Here’s a sketch I did of her several years later:

Gardner Massachusetts was a hardscrabble blue-collar town, but once it had prospered as a center of the wooden furniture industry.  Mt. Wachuset, a little south of there, had been a popular tourist destination, and generations ago the wooded countryside in those parts attracted wealthy summer residents. The whole area had been populated by a “better” class of people; people with an eye for the finer things in life; people, not to put too fine a point on it, with libraries. For years Irene had made her living extracting from attics and closets the books of these long-forgotten residents. In the course of her career she’d probably been in every old house in a fifty-mile radius.

Irene was talkative and large-boned, with orange hair pulled back in a bun and startlingly arched pencil lines where her eyebrows had once been. She and her husband Walt lived in a trailer that was raised up on cinder blocks. A wooden entryway and an “el” had been added, so that it resembled a deformed ranch house. She’d prettied up her front yard with plastic flamingos and wooden cut-out cows and ducks, and a clever windmill that, when the wind blew, made the little man on it seem to be sawing wood. There were concrete birdbaths on either side of the walk, but no birds ever came. Too scary.

Beside the house was a windowless cinderblock bunker about the size of a two car garage. It may, in fact, have been a garage once, since it sported a wooden roll-up garage door. For the past thirty years, however, it had been where Walt lugged the books Irene had just bought. Each load would get put atop the last load, and there they’d sit until they got buried by yet another load. By the time I started shopping there, Irene’s bunker was a solid mass of books, six or seven feet high, illuminated by three dim light bulbs on the ceiling. The front door opened on a path which meandered through these books to a smaller door in the back corner. The way book scouts like me purchased our wares was to travel down this path, digging out interesting tomes and restacking the uninteresting ones on the other side of the path. The effect was similar to the manner in which a river cut its way through a valley. Over time, there was no part of that book heap the path hadn’t scoured. Frequently a fascinating vein would be discovered, producing an island or a new tributary.

The pile had its hazards, though. One winter Irene nearly died when a poorly braced section of the path caved in around her (books are very slippery in the cold) trapping her arms at her sides. She could feel the books draining the heat from her, and she knew it was just a matter of time before she succumbed. Fortunately, Walt came home from work and rescued her. A few winters after this episode, Irene gave me a piece of the birthday cake she’d baked for Walt. I took a bite, put it down, and lost it somewhere among those tens of thousands of books.

The next April I came upon it again, as perfectly preserved as the body of a frozen mountain climber…

After Irene’s I probably ate lunch at the McDonald’s just off the rotary there, then headed west on Route 2 to any of several shops in the Berkshires. Then down to courtly Robert Emerson’s wonderful old church in Connecticut. At each of these stops I might expect to purchase a box or more of art books, Americana, local history, and whatever else seemed sellable, usually spending $100 - $300 per stop. A box of books averaged $50 - $100 at that time.

The next day (no record of where I slept) found me at Hancock Shaker Village, in Pittsfield, Mass., for a bookfair. I have it in my notes that of 30 dealers advertised, only 19 appeared. I sold a total of $380, probably fresh stock from Roland and Irene, and purchased $240 worth.

After expenses, I cleared $38.

Science Experiment

OK, what kind of way is this to drive into a book fair? 

That damned box sat right at the entrance of the parking lot at the Shriner’s Auditorium in Wilmington, Mass., site of the 37^th annual MARIAB (Massachusetts and Rhode Island Antiquarian Booksellers) Book Fair 

Gotbooks pretends it’s a charity, sending books to teachers and soldiers and keeping the environment green, but actually it’s just a scam to get free books, which they then peddle at one of their superstores, or have chimps with barcode scanners put on the Internet. (Peter Stern observed, “Well, at least we have a place to leave our books after the fair.”)

In the ecology of the book trade, they are coliform bacteria. As far as I’m concerned they’re just a bunch of 

But on to cheerier topics. (And no disrespect to the Shriners intended above. They actually DO do good work.)

The venerable MARIAB Bookfair has been through a number of venues and iterations. It was one of the earliest of the provincial shows, and saw some heady years toward the close of last century when book fairs were the Future. Then the Internet and increased real estate values (among other things) brought a decline that saw this event come perilously close to extinction.

I am happy to report that promoter Marvin Getman and a renewed and energized dealer base have brought it back to life.

Indeed, the Shriner’s Auditorium, with its cavernous proportions and long aisles of dealers (about 75 participants this year), reminded me of the early Walter Larsen shows at that old cow barn, the Concourse in San Francisco.

Marvin is not above a little tinkering in an effort to improve his product. This year, for example, he moved the whole show back one hour – opening at 9 AM and closing at 4 PM. An early close is always appreciated by the dealers, but the early opening was looking a little sketchy. At 10 minutes before opening, the line was non-existent.

Ten Minutes Before Opening (Greg)

Marvin saw me snapping my photo and assured me the people would come. Later that afternoon he gleefully emailed me his photo of the crowd, snapped just before the show opened.

Opening (Marvin)

The people did come out, and many of them went home with purchases. Of the dealers I polled, only two had bad shows. Most reported “pretty good.” I didn’t speak with anyone who’d had a great show. But at least we all kept busy. 

This year I tried a science experiment.

I brought many more books than I usually do – I mean GOOD books.

- and offered them all at a 30% discount to the trade and retail customers alike.

I was curious to see if books in a narrow niche like mine (maritime history) had a “price point” at which sales would increase. If my radical price cut resulted in greater sales, should I consider working at a lower margin?

As it turned out, this fascinating (I thought so, anyway) question was rendered either moot, or was answered in the negative, depending on one’s interpretation of the result. The result was, I sold my usual two or three books. 

However, to my considerable surprise, I added seven new names to my mailing list. Usually I only meet a couple of people at each fair who seem interested in what I am selling. Is it possible that my apparent willingness to cut prices made my entire operation seem more interesting or consumer friendly, even though no one found anything to buy at this particular fair?

Or maybe I’m overthinking the whole thing.

Yes, I think I’m overthinking the whole thing.

At least the Old Turk had a good week.

I sold one carton of my new novel (24 copies) at the MARIAB fair, and just a couple of days earlier got some great props from high places.

The Old Turk's Load was selected one of the ten "Best Crime Fiction Debuts" by the influential trade publication, "Booklist" and one of Amazon's "Best Books of the Month" in the "Mystery & Thriller" category.

Go, Turk!

Curation and Creation

A lot has happened at 77 Langsford St. since February 2010. 

On this date one year ago the walls at Flatrocks Gallery were pink.

Now they’re off white, a perfect backdrop for talented artists from Boston’s North Shore area.

Owners Anne Marie Crotty and Cynthia Switzer Roth 

have curated an astonishing five exhibitions in the seven months of the existence of their new gallery. Most recently, they’ve assembled an exciting and visually challenging exhibition called “Fabrications” in which five woman artists transform ordinary materials into objects of whimsy, delicacy, beauty, and strength.

The pieces in “Fabrications” operate in three dimensions and, in many cases, depend on the shadows they throw to add an extra and constantly changing visual element. Hanging this show presented a true test of Anne Marie and Cynthia’s gallery skills,  and their elegant solution represents their greatest success to date. New York, London...

Lanesville!

Way to go, girls.

Of course, for those who can’t or won’t drop two grand for a painting or a sculpture, there are always books, maps, and prints. Ten Pound Island at Flatrocks Gallery is chugging right along. And what is this little alcove except a carefully selected and arranged group of object that tells a story? Yeah, I’m a curator, too.

While we’re speaking of curation, here is an example of another sort. 

It’s called IN THEIR OWN WORDS: The Navy Fights the War of1812, and it is a book about the naval history of the War of 1812, composed of letters, broadsides, pamphlets, documents and books using the actual words of the American naval participants. Their writings take us from the ominous days preceding the war (Decatur’s letter of July, 1810) to a gorgeous tribute volume published long after the war had ended. Every item comes from the collection of my customer and friend, Vice Admiral George Emery  (a few of them by way of Ten Pound Island, I’m happy to say) and every item has been chosen, arranged, and knowledgeably described by him.

Here's how I described him in my 2001 book DEMON OF THE WATERS. 

    He was a collector with fire in his belly. He had the lust for acquisition that people in my trade find irresistible. But more, he had a scholar’s passion for his material, and an understanding of it that could range from deep philosophical insight to pure childlike delight.

    Each item in his collection bore an organic and meticulously documented relation to every other item. He did this because he loved doing it, but ultimately his concentration of rare materials, and the work of discovery he performed upon them, would go to an institution where it would be used by scholars and students of history, or it would go back on the market where it would entertain and inform the next generation. In an understated way, collectors like the Admiral conspired… to single these artifacts out and assign them value. If they were valued it was more likely that they would be preserved.

    He was a genial, unflappable man with baby blue eyes, pink cheeks and a gentle laugh. He had a relaxed way about him that made his military bearing seem the most natural thing in the world. The pressure of the handshake was perfect. The way he stood, one felt, was the way people ought to stand.

    In his day job, he drove a submarine named the Ohio. The Ohio was armed with twenty-four ballistic missiles, each tipped with a hydrogen warhead, the two dozen of them representing more explosive power than had been expended in all of World War II. Sufficient mega tonnage to vaporize half the globe. A few years later, by then a Vice Admiral, he became Commander Submarine Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, a position which put him in control of all the Trident missiles on however many of those monster subs we had lurking around out there. I’d always been nervous about the idea of one man controlling such a devastating force. After getting to know the Admiral, I felt better about the whole situation.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS is a beautiful piece of work, a succinct outline of the war, as well as a catalog of rarities - Softbound in heavy coated stock, color illustrations throughout, printed in a generous 11 x 9 inch landscape format that allows ample room for the documents to tell their stories. AND it’s available for $30, postpaid, from Ten Pound Island Book Co.

But back to my original point. George’s book is as much a curated show as Anne Marie and Cynthia’s exhibitions are. Intellectually the work of assembling and annotating are similar, and in the end both exhibitions tell a distinct and fascinating story. This is quite a different activity than hanging the work of any artist who wants to pay a fee to be in a co-op gallery, or listing thousands of cheap books for sale on Amazon or eBay.

And this leads to the punch line.

If the items in George’s book had prices attached, it would be a bookseller’s catalog. Indeed, what are the best catalogs but curated exhibitions?

For example, we might consider Maritime List 216, “Strange to Spectacular” which has just been posted on the Ten Pound Island website 

The seventy-seven items in this catalog range from a fortune teller’s prediction coming true, to the farthest reaches of the Hermit Islands in 1909 - from the “strange” to the “spectacular.” Along the way you will encounter a rare illustrated history of Britain’s maritime glory, a children’s book about the sinking of the whaleship Essex, a dead sailor’s shaving kit, the first hand account of New York’s worst fire, and many other paper wonders.

Carefully selected, painstakingly annotated, and postpaid!

Boston Strong, World Sick

I admit to being a Moron Sportstalk Radio junkie.

Monday, after an exhausting week in New York launching TheOld Turk’s Load and navigating the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, I recuperated on the couch with six hours of the Boston Marathon (an excellent spectator sport, by the way) and the Boston Red Sox game. Then I paid a few bills and schlepped to the post office. During this short drive Felger & Mazz, two of my favorite sportstalk morons, told me about the Marathon Bombing. They said it put the game of baseball, and all sports, into perspective.

Indeed, falling down a darkened elevator shaft puts baseball in perspective. Bookselling, too. Maritime List 216 languished on my shelves amidst more slaughter of innocents. Then the gut wrenching hunt that followed, spiced by the Senate’s cowardly refusal to do anything about background checks. Friday night I dreamt I was that 19 year old bleeding out inside a shrinkwrapped boat in someone’s driveway. Don’t ask me why. I might tell you.

Then Neil Diamond shows up at the Red Sox game and sings “Sweet Caroline” and the guy on the radio talks about “closure.”

Feels more like a gaping wound to me.

Of Apes and Underwear

As I was getting ready to depart for New York last Monday I received a most interesting email.

Your Amazon.com Today's Deals See All Departments

Greg Gibson, Are you looking for something in our Mystery, Thriller & Suspense books department? If so, you might be interested in these items. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense books The Old Turk's Load by Gregory Gibson List Price: $24.00 Price: $14.19 You Save: $9.81 (41%)

Amazon, at the apogee of its algorithmical perfection, was soliciting me to buy my own book.

That afternoon, having arrived in the Big Apple, I went down to the Mysterious Bookshop 

to sign some copies of The Old Turk’s Load. These, I am proud to report, were bound to Poisoned Pen which had selected the book for their prestigious First Mystery Club (Mysterious also selected the Turk for their - at least as prestigious and similarly named - First Mystery Club) Lo and Behold, Mysterious Bookshop, in its new location, turned out to be right across the street from the Raccoon Lodge, 

a Tribeca bar at which I spent more than a few wild evenings back in the 1980s, “researching” future New York-based crime novels. Though I didn’t know it at the time and, actually, can’t remember it very well now.

Meanwhile, back at the Armory, setup for the 53rd Annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair was proceeding smoothly. 

And, I am happy to report, the show opened to what felt like record crowds. 

Geoff Baere and Lin Respess contemplate record crowds

I think reduced opening night admission and a more generous free ticket policy had a noticeable effect.

Unfortunately, sales did not match the crowd size. By Sunday afternoon, almost all the dealers I spoke with reported decent, but not spectacular, fairs.

It may be, as Jeff Marks and Jennifer Larson suggest, that the continued ascent of the auction rooms is having a negative effect. Jennifer writes, “The degree to which the growing plethora of pre-fair big-ticket auctions sucks oxygen out of the New York Book Fair is undetermined.” Kevin MacDonnell later reported “seven auctions held before the NY bookfair that broke $1m (copied from AE's weekly auction report)  -- this does not include the countless auctions that didn't reach $1m... Every dollar spent in those venues was a dollar that was not spent at the bookfair.”

It may also be that most of the material on the floor was just too damned expensive. Down the aisle from my stand was a cubic foot of books that literally changed western civilization – the famed Columbus Letter, in which the noted explorer announced the discovery of America, and Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, in which the noted astronomer announced the fact that the Church had it wrong (about the sun, anyway). 

The Columbus Letter was priced at $1.3 million and Copernicus, if I remember correctly, at $2.5 million. Even with a generous discount (the Columbus Letter is a maritime book, after all) I wasn’t going to be buying either of those. They were pretty much the high end, but as I walked the aisles I noted no shortage of five and six figure items.

This, of course, makes the four figure books on my shelves seem insignificant. But it also means that replacing them, at least in a venue like the New York fair, is going to be difficult. It’s getting harder for me to buy from the trade at this show, and the material that I do buy is often priced too high for a quick resale to other dealers. (This is called “flipping” and, while it still occurs, the frequency of occurrence is diminishing at my level.)

As it becomes increasingly difficult to buy from the trade for resale to the trade, we lower tier dealers become increasingly dependent on retail and institutional sales. This is a precarious position for us small fry. Just think of a three-legged stool missing a leg.

At the same time, one gets the feeling that there’s something else going on out there. But, to quote the Buffalo Springfield, “what is it ain’t exactly clear.”

This year, more than ever before, many of the books on the floor, particularly the extraordinary stock of the more than eighty European dealers who exhibited, seemed more like antiques or fine art than books. This is something I’ve been yammering about for quite a while.

In the digital age, books have surrendered their primary function as containers of information. They are now items that, while still conveying the traditional uses and values of the book, have moved into the class of antiquities. They have become “objects of desire.” That Columbus Letter was originally meant to serve the same purpose as a newspaper. Now it is more like the Mona Lisa.

To be truly worthy of note, books at this event had to be as much artifacts as collections of words. And if they weren’t cultural monuments like Columbus, Copernicus, or hundreds of other items that graced the shelves of the more spectacular booths, they had better be visually arresting, or unique, or in impossibly fine condition, or they wouldn’t attract the attention of any but the most dedicated librarians and collectors. (Who, happily, were present and diligent enough that most of us got home with sufficient accounts receivable to feed our starveling chilluns.)

In the old days I’d pack my booth with as many as 300 books. Now I only bring a couple of dozen, supplemented by broadsides, photographs, and manuscripts.

Should it surprise anyone that this year’s New York “Book” Fair also brought us a giant ape from Paris, and a pair of Eugene O’Neill’s underwear?

Here’s one the librarians and collectors missed:

TEN COASTAL VIEWS DRAWN IN THE LESSER ANTILLES, SANTO DOMINGO, AND VENEZUELA BY MIDSHIPMAN H.C. NOWELL, HMS SCAMANDER, 1817-1818. An expertly rendered series of ten views of ports and islands, including Martinique, Grenada, St. Vincent, Trinidad, St. Kitts, Santo Domingo, and Cumana in Venezuela. With manuscript captions. Most are done in ink and pencil; one is in ink and watercolor. They vary in size between 5 - 8 1/2 inches tall and 17 1/2 - 37 3/4 inches in length. Some show minor professional repairs, and all have been corner mounted on archival board covered by a protective mylar sheet. Many Royal Navy officers of this era were skilled draftsmen, having been instructed in mechanical drawing and map making as part of their training. However, Nowell stands above his contemporaries. What are nominally Recognition Views (standard navigation aids frequently sketched by sailors) become works of art under his hand.

Housed in green cloth clamshell box measuring 12 1/2 x 40 1/2 inches, with leather cover labels. $20,000

And, as a final note, I'm happy to announce that I sold over 100 copies of The Old Turk's Load to colleagues and friends at the book fair. All profits are bound for the ABAA Benevolent Fund. 

Thank you, generous readers!