A pioneer of recycling
Francis B Cooke wrote dozens of books on sailing between 1900 and 1960, and they are a mine of information on British yachts of his time, and the gear and techniques involved in sailing them, all of which remains relevant to the present day traditional sailing scene. But there was so much overlap in content between the books that it would have been expensive and inefficient for even the most dedicated reader to acquire all of them to achieve ‘full coverage’ of his era.
What it really needed was for someone to condense all that was unique in them into a single, all-encompassing volume; I took on this task, reducing some five thousand pages to around seven hundred, painstakingly edited and typeset, with all of the drawings digitally cleaned up, and some recent photos of many of the self-same boats that Cooke knew a century or so ago. His original books were typographically ‘workmanlike’ and typical of their time, and the new edition of his Cruising Hints set out to reproduce the same feel. Click below to read a few pages.
