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Ben Lowings examines David Lewis's lifetime of adventure forensically yet sympathetically, to comprehend his determination. Lewis's achievements garnered him awards and honours, but their price had ultimately to be paid by the succession of families he created, then broke apart. We may legitimately ask 'was it really all worth it?'

The history and lore of the religion of the ancient Germanic gods known as the Vanir.

Fishing boats of the North Sea have always been fundamental to my existence, writes Gloria Wilson in her Introduction. I have chosen those which, for me, are the most likeable and pleasing, predominantly the classic, cruiser-sterned wooden-hulled seine netters and dual-purpose craft which are splendid sea boats and have such beautiful hull forms.

Inexplicably out of print since the late 1940s, Messing About in Boats is one of the most charming and evocative accounts of work and leisure afloat in the years either side of the Great War. John Muir describes working and sailing in English waters, from the North Sea to the Bristol Channel, in an age long before the marina, GPS and radio.

First published to huge acclaim during the war it describes, Very Ordinary Seaman relates-with humanity, humour and the authority of experience-lower-deck life in the British navy, from basic training to service on a destroyer protecting a convoy to Arctic Russia, a mission from which many did not return.

In photographs, artworks, and words Gloria Wilson celebrates the rugged fishing village where she was brought up, and from which she set her course to a career recording, both visually and verbally, the North Sea fishery she loves.

HEARD ISLAND, an improbably remote speck in the far Southern Ocean, lies four thousand kilometres to the south-west of Australia - with Antarctica its nearest continent. By 1964 it had been the object of a number of expeditions, but none reaching the summit of its 9000-foot volcanic peak "Big Ben'. In that year Warwick Deacock resolved to rectify this omission, and assembled a party of nine with impressive credentials embracing mountaineering, exploration, science and medicine, plus his own organisation and leadership skills as a former Major in the British Army. But first they had to get there. Heard had no airstrip and was on no steamer route; the only way was by sea in their own vessel. Approached from Australia, the island lay in the teeth of the 'Roaring Forties'and 'Furious Fifties'. One name, only, came to mind as the skipper to navigate them safely to their destination, and safely home - the veteran mountaineer turned high-latitude sailor H. W. 'Bill' Tilman, already renowned for his 'sailing to climb' expeditions to Patagonia, Greenland and Arctic Canada, and the sub-Antarctic archipelagos of Crozet and Kerguelen, to the north-west of Heard Island. He readily 'signed on' to Warwick Deacock's team of proven individuals and their well-found sailing vessel Patanela. In this first-hand account, as fresh today as on its first publication fifty years ago, Philip Temple invites us all on this superbly conducted, happy and successful expedition, aided by many previously unpublished photographs by Warwick Deacock. 'The Skipper' - a man not free with his praise - described the enterprise as 'a complete thing'. photographs, maps, drawings

In a post-exploration world, two relatively ordinary blokes, serving Royal Marines, decided they wanted an extraordinary 21st century adventure. In this refreshingly honest account they re-live the highs and lows of sailing and rowing a tiny open boat, completely unsupported, through one of the most iconic wilderness waterways on the planet - the Northwest Passage across the top of Canada. They describe battling with an Arctic storm miles from land and being caught in the worst sea ice for more than a decade. At one point they are forced to drag Arctic Mariner, their seventeen-foot boat, across ten miles of broken pack ice to reach open water. Their story is enriched by the Inuit people and the incredible wildlife they met along the way, including all-too-close encounters with both grizzly and polar bears. And they relate with honesty how the isolation and stresses of the high Arctic shaped the bond between their two very different personalities. This is neither an expose of global warming, nor a detailed study of Inuit culture. It is not particularly long on the historical quest for the Northwest Passage. It is quite simply the tale of two blokes, up north. b/w photographs, maps, drawings

Ken Duxbury and his wife B explore the Greek Islands, sail back to England, and visit Scilly and the Hebrides in this omnibus trilogy of long-established classics of open-boat cruising.

James Wharram's account of his life dedicated to designing, building, and sailing worldwide, craft of the Polynesian double canoe form.

Will Stirling describes and illustrates the many arcane tasks which can daunt the beginning boatbuilder. He has been building clinker dinghiesfor many years and has learned how to avoid the mistakes which lie in wait for the unwary. Benefit from his experience, and draw inspiration from his many mouthwatering photographs of finished boats.

David Hillyard built affordable wooden yachts for the masses, from 1906 to the 1960s-about 800 of them, many of which survive. The company he founded survived for more than a century. This is the story of a unique and significant chapter in the story of British sailing.

This book is a conversation with the past, conducted in a very old, engineless gaff cutter, armed with the Admiralty Pilot, a gallant crew, and a sense of the ridiculous.

This is an anthology of works done for the Order of the Trapezoid in the 1980s. The body of the book contains seventeen articles including: Mysteries of the Graal, On the Way of Wotan and the Left-Hand Path, The Command to Look, Trapezoidal Runology, Runes and Angles, Graal Mythos in Old English Runes?, Runic Origins of the "Peace Sign," Set and Wotan, Walburga in Khem, Trapezoidal Cinema, Austin Osman Spare and the Track of the Trapezoid. There are also articles on the use of occult techniques by the Germans in the 1930s- in myth and reality.

This volume contians "A Semiotic Theory of Rune-Magic," "Is Sigurdr Sigmundr aptrborinn?" and other essays on heroic poetry and religious interpretation in the context of heresies of the Middle Ages and Celtic roots of heroic epic poetry in medieval Germany.

Gloria Wilson documents the Peterhead yard of Richard Irvin & Sons, and the wooden craft for which it became renowned. Some one hundred of her photographs accompany her account of the boats and the people who made up a distinctive and now disappearing maritime culture.

In "Good Little Ship" Peter Willis analyses a classic of maritime literature - Arthur Ransome's "We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea" - and tells the story of the "Nancy Blackett", Ransome's own boat which appears as the "Goblin" in his story, and survives today as an ambassador for Ransome and his tales.

The improbable, yet true, and highly readable story of a Hull steam trawler, her industry, and her people, from her launch in 1906, through fishing, wars, sealing, whaling and exploration, to her final resting place on the edge of the Antarctic.

Martin O'Scannall's engaging account of his forty-year affair with a modest but beautiful Edwardian gaffer, from her acquisition, through her restoration, and on to voyages throughout the British Isles and mainland Europe.