Designer put love of Maine in his boats

JOEL WHITE: BOATBUILDER, DESIGNER, SAILOR, by Bill Mayher and Maynard Bray, photographs by Benjamin Mendlowitz, Noah Publications, Brooklin, Maine. $60.

Everyone with any interest in or affection for wooden boats will want this book. Those who love wooden boats will treasure it. As will every friend or acquaintance of Joel White, the man whose creative mind and designer’s pencil created the wonderfully graceful boats so dramatically pictured in this elegant volume.

And then there’s Maine. For this is also about the state’s inherent traditions of honesty and simplicity that seem somehow to still prevail along much of our breathtaking coast, especially as you work your way Down East.

Joel White grew up along that coast, built his first boat at age 10 (with the assistance of his essayist father, E.B. White) and designed, built and sailed scores more until his death from cancer 57 years later. He loved Maine, respected its traditions and incorporated its lack of pretense, its indigenous integrity into each and every one of his boat designs. It is his determination to simplify, to avoid artifice, to always strive for the excellence that gives his designs their recognizable blend of form and function.

Of the scores of Joel White boats so splendidly photographed in this handsomely produced and lavishly illustrated book, there is not one that does not have the grace of a gull on the wing. Something there was in Joel White’s aesthetic that so valued beauty as well as function that he never designed or built a boat that was not a pleasure to the eye as well as a companion to the sea.

I have sailed and owned several small boats, including a hand-crafted wooden Swampscott dory built by a master, but I never bothered much with boat specifics, with the countless construction details or the design icons that are the ancestors of every successful craft afloat. But Joel White, as I learned early on in this book, was a stickler for detail, a student of tradition, and a man with a true genius for capturing the essence of his designs with his pencil and a few blank sheets of paper: in short, an artist.

But he was also, as his two friends Bill Mayher and Maynard Bray, who collaborated to edit, write and organize this marvelous book, make so clear, a warm and charming human being whose personal integrity and precise speech represented the best of the Maine character. It is their love of White, their fine respect for his qualities as a friend, that come through so clearly and give this book a special quality, a kind of intimacy that is rare indeed, especially in the genre we know as coffee-table books.

Yes, this book is printed and illustrated in an oversize coffee-table format, but it is not a coffee-table book. It is too personal, too intimate, too honest, too loving for that. It is all of that, and more. The more than 100 color photographs by Ben Mendlowitz are more than enough reason to hold this book in your hands and slowly turn its glossy pages. And then, of course, there are the boats, everything from the 7-foot, 7-inch Nutshell Pram, a classic now known the world over, to the final White design, the 76-foot W-Class sloop, a racing sloop of classic, sweeping curves that echo the elegance of another era.

To complete this comprehensive look at one man’s creations, the volume includes sail plans and construction plans for each of the White designs so eloquently documented. Indeed, this is a document of details as much as it is a summary of one man’s life and work. You don’t need to be a marine architect to enjoy the book, but if you are one, you won’t be disappointed by any lack of specifics. It’s all here: a remarkable package.

Joel White would approve. For he was, as we are told, “a man sufficiently grounded as an engineer to comfortably travel into the new world of computer-enhanced design, yet on the other, remain a man resolutely rooted in the most basic of traditions. Arguably, it is this very duality … that explains why his final boats look so good above the waterline and go so fast below it.”