BOOKS
NAUTICAL MUSEUM DIRECTORY 4t h Ed ition An Ill ustrated Directory Listing Nautical Muse ums and Preserved Vessels in the United States and Canada. $2.25 Other Directories avai lable. Auto Muse um Directory, Restored Village Direc tory American Revolution Directory, Aircraft Muse um Direc tory. $2.25 eac h.
PARADE UP THE HUDSON By Mike Eagleson A newly published 56 page so ft cover book abo ut Operation Sail in New York harbor last Jul y. Color covers, maps, rosters, fo reword by Fra nk Braynard. $4 .95 + 25c pos tage.
Quadrant Press, Inc. 19 West 441h Street, New York , N.Y. 10036 · Room 707
Yachting THE MAGAZINE OF POWER AND SAIL 50 Wes t 44th Street NY . NY 10036 • 2 12-391 -1000 OU T - O F - PRINT
BOOKS OF THE SEA Our Speci alty Send $ 1.00 fo r Catalog e Book Sea rch Ser vice e Coll ect io ns Purchased
CARAVAN-MARITIME BOOKS 8706 - 168 th Pl ace. J a m a ica, N.Y. 11432
LA
FRBGITA 41 St. Marks Place, between !st &2nd Avenue New York City
1
C\l FE ESPRESSO APPrt1CISO CAl E.\r LAIT,TK\S ITALt\S P.\STRIES aml SSACl\S. 1
(
1
and / lome Made Pies on I Veeke11ds.
Doors Open at 2PM and Close at Midnight during the Week.and JAM Weekends. foD\t in & Un~tr !
40
world's largest liner. Named Valer/and at her launch in 1913, she reflected German pride as well as Ballin's vision of universal peace and concord. In her twenty-four year life span, she represented other things as well, lifting divisions of soldiers to Europe to fight the Kaiser (after she was seized and put under the American flag) and bringing them home again when the war had been won with the surge of American energies in its last two years. She became a symbol of Anglo-American rivalry after the war, and a central item in the debates that raged over the future of the American merchant marine. She was other things to many other people; seasick doughboys bound on what proved for some a one-way voyage to lands their ancestors had come from but which they had never seen, international socialites, European royalty, and even the estimated 600-700 cats who made their homes aboard her at any one given time. And she was, of course, a tremendous physical structure, from her giant driving machinery (which gave some trouble) to her richly appointed cabins and ballrooms: nearly a thousand feet long, taller than the tallest skyscraper if stood on end (which her illustrators regularly did), her smokestacks wider than the tubes of the new Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River. To William Francis Gibbs, who undertook the garantuan task of redesigning and rebuilding her for American passenger liner service without benefit of German plans, and who then operated her under unique and bitterly contested management arrangements for the U.S . Government, she was the challenge and love of his life-a love affair from which his own America and United States (perhaps the ultimate superliner of all time, and still afloat) were later born. To Frank Braynard, who made his first recorded drawing of the Leviathan at age seven, in 1923 , the yea r this volume of his projected five-volume biography of the ship opens, she is a world in herself, an embodiment of the sweep of history in her time. Correspondence and interviews running to thousands of people have gone to this Forsyte Saga narrative-over 3,000 people subscribe to the Leviathan newsletter he began to 18th & 19th Century
MARINE INSURANCE AND SHIP DOCUMENTS, AUTOGRAPHS Americana catalogue 15 ¢ .
E. MOORE Box 243 Wynn ewood, Pa. 19096
get out for a few interested readers as this work got under way. The work is not easily susceptible of description; you have to immerse yourself in it. This volume takes in the glory years of the Leviathan's career, making her 24-knot, 5 1/i-day crossings with revised turbines and new systems throughout, under the driving force of Gibbs 's management. Mr. Braynard reports that he is now well along on the next volume (each is bigger and more profusely illustrated than the last), and reports with some glee that he has 300 photographs assembled for the month of July 1927. That works out to nearly one per daylight hour for the month, something like a motion picture of the life of the liner which meant so much to so many people, and expressed so much of the changi ng eras she lived through. PS Alice's World, The Life and Photography of an American Original: Alice Austen, 1866-1952, by Ann Novotny (Old Greenwich, Chatham Press, 1976. 222 pp ., illus, $22.95). A marvelously intimate, vivid and moving glimpse into just what the title says (fo.r a change!): "Alice's World." How , after reading Oliver Jensen' s preface, which suggests the indomitable genius of this pioneer photographer, whose work he saved and whose last years in a poorhouse he made easier, and after reading Ann Novotny's carefully documented (through living memories) biography of Miss Austen-how does one end up feeling the book does not do her justice? Perhaps because it does not share Alice's blazing determination to get at the truth of things through her camera (but perhaps no writing could). Perhaps because the ships she loved and the working waterfronts she photographed are hardly shown in this collection of beautiful and touching examples of her work. The photographs, of course, do speak for themselves-and are reproduced with a fidelity worthy of her art. It' s a good book to own, to read, to reflect upon . But where Alice transcended class, from the very difficult position of genteel and increasi ng poverty, the book is obsessed with class: "Oh look," it says to us, "look at her sexual and so-
SONGS OF SOUTH STREET -STREET OF SHIPS~ 25 Sea Chanteys ~ W .J Each wilh Explanatory Tex t ~ C HANT EYMAN PRESS $3 . plus 50c shipping and handling from N.M.H.S., 2 Fullen St. Brooklyn , NY 11201