Buy this book on-line FOWLES**, JOHN - text by: : SHIPWRECKSLONDON.CAPE,1974. ISBN 0224010530.
UK,slim,landscape 8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn.
FINE/NFINE.No owner inscrptn,and no price-clip to dw/dj.Bright,crisp,clean, matt b/w contemporary shipwreck(s) photographic illustrated dw/dj and white lettering; with negligible shelf-wear and creasing to edges and corners - no major nicks or tears present.Top+fore-edges generally bright and clean; contents bright,tight and pristine - no dog-ear reading creases to any pages' corners - possibly an unread example? Bright,crisp, clean,sharp-cornered,publisher's original, plain dark blue cloth boards with bright, crisp,stamped three-masted shipwreck gilt silhouette to upper bd's lower,right-hand corner,bright,crisp,stamped gilt letters to spine/backstrip and clean grey endpapers.UK,slim,landscape 8vo HB+dw/dj, 1st edn,48pp [unpaginated] includes b/w oval vignetted photographic illustrated title page,b/w contemporary harbour scenic photographic frntis,author intro,potted biography of the Gibson's (the photographers),17 full-page b/w shipwreck photographs,1 double-page similar and 16 three-quarter page similar with corresponding text by John Fowles.
It seems inconceivable that the ships illustrated in this book,with their air of
permanence,of beauty allied with strength,
should have ever met with destruction.Yet the sea has claimed them.The coasts of the
Scilly Isles and West Cornwall have probably proved more lethal than any comparable area in the world.
Four generations of the Gibson family of the Scillies,starting with John Gibson in the 1860's, have recorded the last moments
of the ships,great and small,beautiful and
utilitarian,which have met their end on these treacherous shoals and rocks.This book is a selection of the best of their photographs - superb visual epitaphs of maritime disaster which show the Gibsons to be neglected masters of the camera.
John Fowles's fascinating Introduction sets the shipwreck - together with the ancient Cornish 'industry' of wrecking - in its historical and psychological perspective,and the detailed notes on each
ship and its final days,compiled with the aid of Rex Cowan's impressive knowledge of
the area and it's history,form a haunting adjunct to the photographs.
'Shipwreck',then,is a book which will be a source of endless pleasure for all - both as a moving evocation of the great ships of the past,and as an example of the
photographer's art unrivalled in its
field.
Since the 17thC Gibsons have lived on the
Scilly Isles.In the early 1860's John Gibson,a seaman,taught himself between voyages to use the very recently invented camera.By 1866 John had quit the sea and set up as a professional,his son, Alexander,a self-taught scholar,joining him in the business a few years later at the age of fourteen.
It was Alexander who brought a perfectionism to the arrangement of his pictures and often with great skill retouched his plates.Alexander's son,
James,acquired all the shipwreck plates after a quarrel which resulted in his father retiring to the mainland.John Gibson died in 1920 at the age of ninety-three; and now James's son Frank carries on the tradition of photographing the sea and recording the many dramatic shipwrecks
that still occur around those menacing coasts.
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