WOODENBOAT

We must begin BoatLit-207 with the magna cum laude, the summo canicula of boat-building academia: WoodenBoat Magazine. Founded in 1974 by Jon Wilson in an off-the-grid Maine cabin, WoodenBoat has curated all of the skills, thrills, and aesthetics found in creating vessels of all shapes and sizes and launched an empire of the genre with a WoodenBoat Store, a WoodenBoat School, and the magnificent WoodenBoat Show at Mystic Seaport Museum. WB has long been the go-to authority on the creation and care of all things wooden and floating. And that ad on the back cover looks smashing. Certainly unsurpassed in the study of beckets, bungs, rabbets, stems, strakes, tenons, toeys, and bearding lines, WoodenBoat is in a class by itself.

ACBS RUDDER

Aligned closely with the academy's history department, there are the ACBS clubs; sort of the Hellenic family of Antique & Classic Boat Society chapters of which the journalistic crème de la crème is ACBS Rudder. This stylish quarterly is the delightful creation of the national ACBS mothership headquartered in Clayton, NY—an organization that catalogs the depth and breadth of antique boat restoration. Rudder is an adjunct of the Antique Boat Museum with its 300+ boat collection including Wild Goose, the 40-foot, high-speed motor launch just turning a sprightly 110 years old.

CLASSICBOAT

Another faculty favorite, Classicboat, is the award-winning quarterly published by our neighbors to the north, ACBS Toronto. This professional color publication covers a wide range of topics with typical Canadian flair—that being backdrops of stunning, shoreline conifers, Great Lakes outings, and regular encounters with antlered wildlife. It's a membership perk, but contributing to ACBS Toronto is a fine investment as they are one of the largest and most active ACBS chapters on the continent.

Others in the syllabus of ACBS chapter publications include Western Wood, the glossy newsletter from the Northern California/Lake Tahoe Chapter to whom we also donate varnish for their legendary, 55-foot, John Hacker-designed Thunderbird speedboat. And in Florida, the Sheerline from the Sunnyland ACBS in Lakeland, docked at the Mount Dora Yacht Club.

Some of our more eclectic professors emeriti take particular interest in frequenting  Woody Boater, said to be always a far-out place to tie up. 

Lastly, let's discuss a distinctive pair of branded-class digests from classic-owners associations of impeccable pedigree.

THE BRASS BELL

If old black-and-white shots of vintage Chris-Crafts are your magnet, The Brass Bell will pull you in in a heartbeat. Each issue is chock full of stories, photographs, and historical ephemera targeted specifically to the classic boat enthusiast. Generational histories of Chris-Craft ownership and member profiles will put you in the driver’s seat of a boat you may have never seen before. Color, glamor, style, elan, and smart—that's The Brass Bell. Every issue is a classic in and of itself and you'll want to shelve each one wisely in your own library.

We caught this note on the fly. Millions of boaters are familiar with Ratty's advice to Mole from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” Included in that knowledgeable group is Mick Herron, ace writer of the Slow Horses spy novels and Apple TV series.

Mr. Herron commented recently that Grahame's magnum opus is "a classic often regarded as a heartwarming tale about talking animals, but which is actually rife with criminal behavior—speeding offenses, contempt of court, jailbreak, identity theft, horse rustling, hate speech (“onion sauce!”), coercive deprogramming, home invasion, vigilantism, carol singing…Barely a page goes by without some new horror. And it’s also a heartwarming tale about talking animals."