New book a labor of love for yacht fans Maine writers create masterful collection

Book signing party

When: 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., Friday, March 3

Where: Penobscot Marine Museum, Main Street, Searsport

Admission: $10, reservations requested

Contact: 548-2529

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF YACHT DESIGNERS, by Lucia del Sol Knight and Daniel Bruce MacNaughton, W.W. Norton & Co., New York and London. 530 pages, hardback (slip-covered), $250.

The authors of “The Encyclopedia of Yacht Designers” and I worked together at WoodenBoat magazine in the mid-1970s, which was a much different time. Dan was a 20-year-old dropout from the College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor; Lucia was from the West Coast and had worked in the real world; I had worked in a boatyard. None of us knew anything about publishing magazines, or books for that matter. What we did have was enthusiasm, a great love of boats, and not enough smarts to know that we couldn’t do what we were supposed to do, so we just did it. From the heft of their book and the breadth of knowledge contained therein, Dan and Lucia still have this attitude. A whole lot of work was done by them, and done with great enthusiasm.

First the numbers: the book profiles 525 yacht designers, used the services of 87 writers overseen by a 33-member editorial board, contains 650 black-and-white photographs and drawings, and weighs in at eight pounds. This is an incredible piece of work. When I spoke with Dan or Lucia about the project during their many years of effort, I never really had a clue about how high a bar they had set for themselves. This is truly a magnificent book.

At one point while Dan and Lucia were working on the encyclopedia, I read Simon Winchester’s wonderful book, “The Professor and the Madman,” which deals with the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary and the two very different souls who put their hearts and lives into that tome. I often found parallels in the yacht encyclopedia project.

This is heart and soul, a Maine production. Dan lives in Belfast, was brought up in Bangor and is operations manager for Rockport Marine in Rockport. Lucia lives in Brooksville with her husband, Bob, and runs Knight Associates, an architectural firm. Other Maine fingers are all over the project – writers, photographers, mentors. The book has more than a dozen Maine designers.

The encyclopedia was 10 years in the making, and I can’t imagine how much of that time was taken up by finding all of the drawings and photographs; how much was absorbed by holding the hands of all those writers; how much was spent polishing the prose. And how much time was spent by the technical staff at the publishers, W.W. Norton & Company, as they labored over all those photographs from hundreds of different photographers, from differing eras and varying degrees of quality, to make them all look so gorgeous. Like the work of the yacht designers who are profiled, every aspect of the book seems to work seamlessly and effortlessly toward its goal.

While some may think that the authors’ goal was to create an authoritative guide to the work of the world’s yacht designers, both living and dead, I feel they were trying for something more, a wonderfully readable and fun book for people who just love boats. The average reader will find the encyclopedia beautiful to look at, but those who just love boats will be mesmerized by it. They will be lost in it for hours. There are boats of every description: sail, power, antique, modern, big, and small. While it is the boats that draw the reader in, it is the stories of the designers themselves that keep the reader going.

This is how the book works for me: I start by looking up someone, say William H. Tripp Jr., who designed the Bermuda 40 sailboat for the Henry R. Hinckley Company of Southwest Harbor, but because his listing is nearby, I wind up reading about Henri ‘Amel’ Tonet, a French designer born in 1912.

The entry begins, “Like John Brown Herreshoff, the famous builder of Bristol, Rhode Island, Henri Tonet was a talented yachting professional who lost his eyesight; again like Herreshoff, he continued to work. Tonet (whose name as a French Resistance fighter was ‘Amel’ became a boatbuilder and naval architect in 1946, at Lyon, on his own and self taught.” What a lead; it sends me off again, on hours of reading pleasure. It starts with the boats, but it is all about the people.

This is one of the most important books of yachting history to be published in recent years. And like everything connected with yachting, it comes at a price: $250. At my last look in the chandleries, this is about the same cost as a gallon of premium bottom paint, yet I can assure readers that they will get many more seasons out of “The Encyclopedia of Yacht Designers.”

John K. Hanson Jr. is the publisher of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors magazine based in Camden. He can be reached at john@maineboats.com.