HMS Bounty

 Ever since I was a very young boy, I've been fascinated by the story of the mutiny on HMS Bounty.  Before I made it to high school, I had already read Charles Nordoff's and James Norman Hall's novel Mutiny on the Bounty more than once.  In my college years, I travelled to England and visited the grave of Captain (later Admiral) Bligh in a Lambeth churchyard.  While I never got to personally visit the movie prop reproduction Bounty used in the 1962 movie, I have watched all the various movies through the years, read all the biographies and other books on the topic, and even read the facsimile copy of Bligh's log that he kept after the mutiny, when he was set adrift in a small boat with other loyalist crewmembers.  So I was especially proud to acquire an original oil painting of the storied vessel.  This artistic triumph was painted by Patrick O'Brien, an award-winning marine artist living in Baltimore, Maryland.  (He is not to be confused with the British novelist Patrick O'Brian, author of the "Master and Commander" series of novels.)  The artist O'Brien is president of the American Society of Marine Artists, and is a wonderfully talented painter and book illustrator.  His interpretation of the ill-fated Bounty now sits in my home and each day I can view it and think back to those tumultuous days in 1789 when a disaffected portion of the ship's crew took possession of the ship from its commander.

HMS Bounty Approaching Tahiti by Patrick O'Brien

Hot off the press

 Another wonderful issue of one of my favorite 'zines landed in my mailbox today.  This is No. 62 of The Mystery and Adventure Series Review, published by Fred Woodworth.  Fred has been steadily putting out multiple publications since 1969.  He does this entirely without use of digital equipment of any kind.  Instead, he uses analog offset printing presses and associated gear of the sort that I remember from my teen years, working in my father's print shop in the 1980s.  It's painstaking and skilled work, made more challenging by the fact that supplies for the printing process are becoming difficult or impossible to obtain. To overcome the obstacles, Fred turns to his endless resourcefulness to improvise solutions for each problem.  I'm astonished by his technical and typographic knowledge, and his unstoppable drive to publish his catalog of 'zines.

This 'zine ostensibly focuses on boy's series books, but delves into many literary and typographic topics.  On top of all that, Fred has been publishing a novel which has been serialized over several past issues in the manner of Charles Dickens in the mid 1850s.  This issue of the Review contains the final chapters of The Sunken City, a Tom Quest novel.  The anachronistic charm of every aspect of this magazine really gets me where I live.  I've been a subscriber for over a decade now, and while the years are piling up for Fred, I hope he continues for many more.