Description

Prima e unica edizione. FIRST EDITION. Large folio. (50 x 38 cm.). Title, preface, index, "frontispiece" mounted on verso of index and 31 lithographed plates mounted one per page as published, each with accompanying leaf of descriptive text. Original publisher's navy blue pictorial cloth, with gilt title and decorations to upper cover, all edges gilt. Slight rubbing at extremities of binding, a few finger smudges to margins of some pages. Generally a very nice, clean copy. The Royal Clyde Yacht Club was the biggest in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, larger even than the Solent Yacht Club, and Clyde yachts were world-famous as pioneers of the relatively new sport of yacht racing. This book reproduces in chromolithography a series of watercolours by Henry Shields RBA (1859-1935) showing famous yachts or "white wings", mostly built 1880-87, with four boats built prior to 1880 included as notable precursors of the Clyde yacht boatbuilding style. Three of them (the "Genesta," "Galatea," and "Thistle") had made attempts to win the America's Cup.