The Rudder Magazine for Yachtsmen

I recieved one of those Borders gift cards in my stocking this year (thank you ET) and was browsing the "sports" section in my local store on Saturday looking for a good sea tale to tide me through the winter season. Something called "The Rudder Treasury" caught my eye...a paperback with a good heft to it. I cracked the preface and thus began my education on "The Rudder Magazine for Yachtsmen" which was - unbeknownst to me - one of the most important yachting and boating magazines in publication from it's founding in the 1891 to it's demise in the 1950's. Though I've just begun sifting through some of the excerpts compiled in "The Rudder Treasury" I can tell that I'm in for a real treat...what a discovery!

The forward is written by contemporary boating writer/editor, Peter Spectre who asks (rhetorically) what was so special about The Rudder and then cites founding editor Thomas Fleming Day as the reason. Day “knew what he was talking about. He was an enthusiast with a deep knowledge of the subject and a well-founded point of view. He treated his readers as intelligent human beings. He didn't pander to advertisers. He recognized yacht design as an evolution, with a connected past, present and future...he was a literate, literary man of strong opinion.”