Children and grown men have always, in their hearts if not in actuality, gone down to the sea in ships. The appeal of the sea is universal and lasting, and innumerable books have been written about it. But in all the vast literature about the sea there has not been such a book as Oars, Sails and Steam —a picture book which must inevitably find its way into the library of everyone who loves ships and the sea, who has labored lovingly over boat models, and who finds in the evolution of shipbuilding the pageantry and romance of the growth of civilization.

Edwin Tunis knows and loves ships, and he has utilized his very special skill and knowledge to produce the beautiful, detailed pictures in this book. He has drawn the most interesting and important types of boats of which we have any record; they appear in chronological order and reveal, more clearly than any text alone could, each advance, each new principle incorporated into sailing vessels to make sailing and navigation easier and better.

To his fine drawings he has added clear, simple diagrams and a glossary of seagoing terms. Beginning with what was probably the first boat, a dugout, he has included canoes, Egyptian boat models, Greek war galleys, a Roman trireme, Roman merchantman, Norse Oseberg ship, English warship, carrack, Elizabethan galleon, Elizabethan crumster, U. S. frigate, Fulton's Clermont, privateer, steamer, clipper ship, whaling brig, windjammer, destroyer, battleship, aircraft carrier, battle cruiser, and many others.

With the perspective of the historian and a great deal of humor, Mr. Tunis has accompanied his drawings with a charming and historically accurate text which explains why these boats are interesting and how they were developed. His detailed drawings of riggings, how a gun crew functions, and other operations of seagoing craft are remarkable for their clarity and accuracy, and his marginal explanations of sea terminology are historically interesting and of inestimable value in understanding the sailing modes of other days.

This is one of the most beautiful one-volume pictorial and textual histories of sailing ever produced. Each ship develops a personality of its own for the reader under the magic of Edwin Tunis' skill - and each page becomes a new adventure in the chain of man's progress on the sea. From the first venture on a tiny stream to the present epic of the huge oceangoing vessel, the romance of men and ships is beautifully written and illustrated; man's ingenuity is remarkably documented.

Oars, Sails and Steam is a treasury of ship lore for those who are sailors at heart.

From the dust jacket