Two authors and a beautiful mess

Obsessions, and why your copy is probably a photocopy.

Confession first: I don't own The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. Neither do most kayak builders I know. What floats around is a copy of a copy: a few pages of hull lines, a bit crooked on the scanner glass, handed from one workshop to the next like grandma's meatball recipe. The Rebel stack is the front matter, the editor's page, and then a jump to page 190. No explanations. Just lines. Which is kind of fitting, because the book itself was pieced together from somebody else's life's work.

Here is some research from The Internetz:

Meet the obsessive

Edwin Tappan Adney, born 1868 in the US. Artist, writer and, above all, a guy who could not stop staring at canoes. As a young man he met Maliseet builders in New Brunswick and learned to build a birchbark canoe the old way, by hand, from people who had done it for generations. That was it. Game over. For more than fifty years he measured, drew and built scale models, hundreds of them, of canoes that were vanishing as fast as the people who knew how to build them grew old.

On the side he covered the Klondike gold rush as a newspaper correspondent. Because a man needs a hobby, apparently ;)

Then he ran out of time

Adney died in 1950. The research was enormous, and a total mess: notes, drawings, models, but no finished book. Every workshop has one of those. Mine is not the messiest. I've been to (kayak builder Grandpa) VKV's office in Västervik :) The half-built frame in the corner that somebody "will get back to". You know the one. Don't pretend you don't.

Enter the finisher

Howard I. Chapelle, naval architect and curator at the Smithsonian, a man who could draw a hull like he'd paddled it. He took Adney's pile, turned it into a book, and then added the part I actually care about: the Arctic skin boats. Kayaks and umiaks from Greenland to Alaska, taken off museum specimens and old records and drawn in the same careful lines. It came out in 1964 as United States National Museum Bulletin 230, printed by the US Government Printing Office. Yep. One of the great kayak books is technically a government publication. Your tax dollars at work, if you happened to pay taxes in America in 1964, when tax was more than interest on loans.

So the book has two authors who never wrote it together. One gave his life to the canoe. The other made sure that life ended up somewhere, and sneaked the kayak in at the back. Respect to both.

Why I care

Without that handover, a lot of these hull shapes would only exist as dusty, fragile frames in museum basements. Or not at all. Every time someone scales up a set of lines from a photocopy, they paddle a little bit of Adney's obsession and Chapelle's stubbornness. I find that weirdly moving, for a stack of crooked A4s. From page 190 and on...

And the photocopies belong in the story too. This book was always about knowledge passed on by hand. A Maliseet builder to Adney. Adney's notes to Chapelle. Chapelle to Johan Wirsén, just another guy in a Borgholm shed, obsessed with lines, with a thumbed, crooked scan of some pages and a head full of ideas. Go figure.

One respectful caveat

Lines taken off museum boats are a snapshot of one hull, measured by outsiders, sometimes long after it was built. A starting point, not scripture. The hunter who built the original would have measured you first. As a builder, that's the sentence I'd tattoo on my forearm. (See: Measure Twice, Cut Once, Blame Your Forearm.)

Your turn: what's the most-copied page in your workshop? A set of lines, a rib-bending chart, a coffee-stained sheet of sewing instructions nobody remembers copying? Tell us in the comments. I'll make a hall of fame for the most doodled and battered one if you send a pic.

//Tibor