The Story of Sail

by Veres Laszlo and Richard Woodman

From the earliest known craft of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to the final surviving sailing ships of this century, every major step in the development of the sailing ship is beautifully illustrated... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1557508968
• ISBN13: 9781557508966
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 4.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 9.9" x 11.7"

Customer Reviews

Gorgeous example of the illustrator's art

This is one of those collections of extraordinarily detailed and extremely exact drawings that will keep you poring over it with an enlarging lens for weeks. More than 1,000 technical line drawings by a very skilled illustrator takes you from prehistoric bladder-floats and Assyrian reed boats, through Roman grain carriers and Columbus's little PINTA (a "caravela redonda") and West Indiamen of the 18th century, right up to a modern Japanese motor junk and even the KON-TIKI, not to mention every rigged warship and clipper you ever heard of. And scores of variations on the common fishing boat. And Antarctic exploration vessels. And modern pleasure yachts. And on and on and on! Woodman's equally clear and detailed explanatory text is icing on the cake. The whole thing is printed on heavy coated paper, which greatly enhances the detail. This is not at all a cheap book, but if this subject fascinates you (as it does me), it's definitely the best thing out there.

More boats than you can shake a stick at!

Mr.Woodman (of the Nathaniel Drinkwater novels fame) shows the depth of his experience and research in the accompanying text to Mr.Laszlo's finely detailed scale drawings, which cover the 5,000 or so years of sailing development.As far as I know, this is the only place where you will find the whole history of sail, with typical craft from all the sailing countries in one volume.Logically arranged in roughly chronological order, we see the development from sail-assistance (galleys), through square- and lateen-rigs to the full ship & clipper rig of the19thC and modern solid sails. Here the devotee of nautical literature can see at a glance the difference between a brig and a snow, and why a settee is not a lateen rig.The chapters on small working boats from all countries is very useful, especially for the fine detail of standing and running rigging. Of particular interest to the modeller is the section on ship's boats, which includes the sail rigs employed and seating arrangements.The sections on eastern craft are particularly interesting, as we rarely see these depicted as scale drawings... Here we see junks, sampans, proas, prahus, catamarans, dhows, booms, sambuks etc. A wonderful book, that I recommend to anyone with a passing interest in sail. *****

An outstanding history and reference compendium.

The Story of Sail features over 1000 scale drawings of sailboats and provides a beautiful history of sail, from its earliest beginnings to modern times. No color photos of vessels here, but the intricate scale drawings are the draw and provide outstanding detail.