You can now pre-order Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or direct from The History Press.
I’m currently cobbling together a schedule of signings/presentations I will be giving in upcoming months. I’ll post the dates soon.
The History Press has released the cover art for Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer.
The illustrations composing the cover were all made by William D. Lee, an institution in Fairfield’s history and Connecticut’s art history.
A WW2 veteran who graduated Yale on the GI Bill with a degree in fine arts, he was responsible (along with many other things) for renovating the Sun Tavern on the town green and organizing the 1989 commemoration of the British attack on Fairfield, which involved hundreds of re-enactors and even a mock naval engagement off the beach.
Late in writing the book, I contacted Bill to ask permission to use several images inside, including a photo of a scale model of the Defence he had built. Serendipitously, Bill had been at work completing a painting of the Defence when I called. Not only did he offer use of the painting, but he went ahead and painted a portrait of Smedley specially for the book. The portrait is based on the single surviving image of Smedley known to us, a tiny cameo he had painted allegedly while in Amsterdam.
Bill amazes me with his boundless talent and creativity — he can seemingly call new things into existence simply by laying his fingertips on wood and canvas and metal. His house is like a combined art gallery and toy store. He once made sailboats for a living; has created architectural facades and murals for buildings throughout southern Connecticut; fashions model ships and trains and even built a remote-controlled model of a Sikorsky S-39. I cannot overemphasize his generosity and I feel very fortunate that he participated in the project.
Also, the book’s website is live. I’ve kept the design simple, but it includes a description and a brief excerpt. It will be available for pre-order at Amazon and bn.com in a few weeks and should be in stores by late June.
If you’ve visited this site over the past few weeks, you may have noticed odd things. Like parts of the sidebar vanishing. Or giant 40-point typeface. Or broken code.
Like a caveman reverse-engineering a spaceship, I’ve been futzing around with the design of the site. I’m very pleased with the result. There are a few minor additions I’ll be making in the near future — including the cover art for Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer, which is amazing — but any weirdness you may have experienced (I’m looking at you, Russian spambots!) should be at an end. Well, the technical weirdness anyway.
A huge thank-you goes to Jeremy Tolbert at Clockpunk Studios for the new title banner above. It’s difficult to find recommendations for good designers; whenever I ask my IT friends if they know anyone — naively believing that maybe, you know, the guy or girl in the next cube over does graphic work on the side — I receive such helpful advice as, “Try Craigslist.” Jeremy’s price was right and he worked unbelievably fast (a matter of hours) to deliver the product. He does whole WordPress themes in addition to his graphic design. Please consider him if you need a job done.
With the behind-the-scenes work complete, hopefully I may now devote more time to content. Meantime, give a shout if anything is still acting wonky on your end.
Angus Phillips on Richard Henry Dana’s classic Two Years Before the Mast:
Not that it’s a quick or easy read. Dana, son of a poet, made the choice that all who write about the seagoing life must make—whether to do so in the rich, exotic language of the ship and risk losing landlubbers along the way, or to dumb it down so everyone could breeze through. He took the hard way, keeping it real, as we say today.
The challenge of writing Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer was weaving a narrative that was equal parts local history, American Revolution history, and maritime history, bound by a tight 30,000-word limit. And, early on, I had to confront the same issue Phillips raises: whether to spend valuable verbiage explaining nautical jargon to readers or to proceed regardless and hope they speak salt as a second language.
I adopted what I call a History 201 approach, specifying recurrent themes or details but assuming readers knew the general course of events or customs (or at least could look them up). I rarely defined the differences between types of vessels, for example. If the reader really burns to know what a schooner or snow is, there are better explanations available elsewhere than I had space to give. In contrast I defined brigs and ships because Smedley’s Defence was both.
Another decision: I jettisoned the traditional measure of a ship’s size by tonnage, which involves a complicated formula interesting only to Age-of-Sail historians and model-ship builders, for a comparative yardstick by number of cannons. Saying a ship was 200 tons means nothing to a reader, but he will understand that a 16-gun brig was more powerful than an 8-gun schooner and dwarfed by a 64-gun frigate.
Otherwise, the West Country accent isn’t too thick. Any reader who knows her bow from her stern should enjoy it.
I delivered the manuscript April 1 and the copyeditrix and I are doing polishes now. Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer goes to press in early May and should be available by late June.
Jacob Sullum on the government shutdown:
The saddest scenario envisioned by the Times involves a Cincinnati woman who is driving to Washington, D.C., on Friday with her family and plans to visit the Smithsonian Institution. When she gets there, the Times gravely informs us, she may be greeted by paper signs that say “Closed Due to Government Shutdown.” Tragic as that would be, I have to ask why the hell the government needs to run a set of museums that paying customers are so eager to visit. Ditto the National Zoo and the national parks, which also will close temporarily in the event of a shutdown. If people really value such facilities, they would be willing to pay for private versions of them, whether as customers or as patrons. If they don’t, how can it be right to forcibly take their money and use it for these decidedly nonessential purposes?
There is no doubt in my mind that government transparency is aided and abetted by the maintaining of archives, so I see no contradiction between supporting the Smithsonian and my belief in low taxes. Written documents can tell us a lot about what occurred in the past but so can material culture. That is the difference between history and archaeology. If we agree to preserve the plans of how to build an Apollo rocket capsule, then is it so strange to also preserve the capsule itself? The only quibble is what exactly should be preserved. The Wright Flyer or a fossilized T-rex skull is more relevant and important than an inaugural gown will ever be. Or maybe not. We can argue over criteria.
That said, I don’t have a problem with the Smithsonian charging a modest admission fee to offset some of its costs. But there’s no way user fees could ever cover the expense of curating its massive holdings.
The National Zoo is more problematic. One imagines a likewise biological archive where visitors could experience the indigenous fauna of the 50 states, but in reality there’s not so much as a bison burger in the National Zoo cafeteria. The place is instead a menagerie of pandas and elephants and kangaroos — whatever animals have been dropped on us by foreign dignitaries. It’s a run-down, random mishmash and it should be completely privatized.
As for national parks, battlefields, and so on: I don’t lose sleep over them. If the day ever comes when the most egregious abuse of government is taking our tax money to spend on public parks and libraries, then libertarians have won.