Glass Plates and Wooden Boats

Book excerpt: For forty years after the turn of last century, Willard Jackson trolled the waters off Marblehead, Massachusetts, in a custom motor launch carrying a wooden camera and a box of glass-plate negatives. His quarry? Any vessel that made its way into and out of that mecca of American sailing. Over a century later, the archive of several thousand pictures he collected stands as a one-of-a-kind record of the early development of the American yacht. Matthew Murphy, editor of WoodenBoat magazine, uses Jackson's remarkable work to trace the history of the pleasure sailboat. Each of 75 sharp, breathtaking images is accompanied by a 300-word caption.