Allan Vaitses is an able and versatile builder, having a marvelous ability to devise solutions for the dilemmas that arise in boatbuilding.

The second book in our Classic Boat series aimed at traditional boat lovers, builders and restorers. Lofting is an essential stage in the transition between designing and building a boat in order to turn the design plans into boat lines plans to measure off and build the full-size boat. Its a tricky art, but this book shows exactly how it is done in clear, step-by-step diagrammatic stages. Aimed specifically at the amateur DIY builder, it will enable anyone to build a boat of any size, whether power or sail. The author has been teaching lofting to boatbuilding students for over 10 years, and has found that the key to understanding is visualisation - hence the plethora of step-by-step diagrams in this book to assist the reader to grasp the concepts. Lofting will be welcomed by budding boatbuilders everywhere.

This is an unblushing story of Claire, a woman who finds meaning, excitement, and fulfillment through sexual abandonment. She finds a sinister but alluring guide in Nick, who is determined to reveal to Claire her own feelings that have been repressed.This novel revels in the hidden and the taboo, and at the same time is told with the utmost grace, charm, and intelligence.

Doctor Dolittle heads for the high seas in perhaps the most amazing adventure ever experienced by man or animal. Told by nine-and-a-half-year-old Tommy Stubbins, crewman and future naturalist, the voyages of Doctor Dolittle and his company lead them to Spidermonkey Island. Along with his faithful friends, Polynesia the parrot and Chee-Chee the monkey, Doctor Dolittle survives a perilous shipwreck and lands on the mysterious floating island. There he meets the wondrous Great Glass See Snail who holds the key to the greatest mystery of all.

On the battlefield, Wulfhere fights for his life but elsewhere the enemy is closer to home, sinister and shadowy and far more dangerous than any war. 1054, pious King Edward sits on the throne, spending his days hunting, sleeping and praying, leaving the security of his kingdom to his more capable brother-in-law Harold Godwinson, the powerful Earl of Wessex. Against this backdrop we meet Wulfhere, a Sussex thegn who, as the sun sets over the wild forest of Andredesweald, is returning home victoriously from a great battle in the north. Holding his lands directly from the King, his position demands loyalty to Edward himself, but Wulfhere is duty-bound to also serve Harold, a bond forged within Wulfhere's family heritage and borne of the ancient Teutonic ideology of honour and loyalty. Wulfhere is a man with the strength and courage of a bear, a warrior whose loyalty to his lord and king is unquestionable. He is also a man who holds his family dear and would do anything to protect them. So when Harold demands that he wed his daughter to the son of Helghi, his sworn enemy, Wulfhere has to find a way to save his daughter from a life of certain misery in the household of the cruel and resentful Helghi without compromising his honour and loyalty to his lord, Harold. Sons of the Wolf is a panoramic snapshot of medieval life and politics as the events that lead to the downfall of Anglo Saxon England play out, immersing the reader in the tapestry of life as it was before the Doomsday Book. With depictions of everyday life experienced through the minds of the peoples of the time; of feasts in the Great Halls to battles fought in the countryside, it cannot help but enlighten, educate and entertain.

In writing the story of our adventures in the Moon I, Thomas Stubbins, secretary to John Dolittle, M.D. (and son of Jacob Stubbins, the cobbler of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh), find myself greatly puzzled. It is not an easy task, remembering day by day and hour by hour those crowded and exciting weeks. It is true I made many notes for the Doctor, books full of them. But that information was nearly all of a highly scientific kind. And I feel that I should tell the story here not for the scientist so much as for the general reader. And it is in that I am perplexed. For the story could be told in many ways. People are so different in what they want to know about a voyage. I had thought at one time Jip could help me; and after reading him some chapters as I had first set them down I asked for his opinion. I discovered he was mostly interested in whether we had seen any rats in the Moon. I found I could not tell him. I didn’t remember seeing any; and yet I am sure there must have been some—or some sort of creature like a rat. Then I asked Gub-Gub. And what he was chiefly concerned to hear was the kind of vegetables we had fed on. (Dab-Dab snorted at me for my pains and said I should have known better than to ask him.) I tried my mother. She wanted to know how we had managed when our underwear wore out—and a whole lot of other matters about our living conditions, hardly any of which I could answer. Next I went to Matthew Mugg. And the things he wanted to learn were worse than either my mother’s or Jip’s: Were there any shops in the Moon? What were the dogs and cats like? The good Cats’-meat-Man seemed to have imagined it a place not very different from Puddleby or the East End of London. No, trying to get at what most people wanted to read concerning the Moon did not bring me much profit. I couldn’t seem to tell them any of the things they were most anxious to know. It reminded me of the first time I had come to the Doctor’s house, hoping to be hired as his assistant, and dear old Polynesia the parrot had questioned me. “Are you a good noticer?” she had asked. I had always thought I was—pretty good anyhow. But now I felt I had been a very poor noticer. For it seemed I hadn’t noticed any of the things I should have done to make the story of our voyage interesting to the ordinary public. The trouble was of course attention. Human attention is like butter: you can only spread it so thin and no thinner. If you try to spread it over too many things at once you just don’t remember them. And certainly during all our waking hours upon the Moon there was so much for our ears and eyes and minds to take in it is a wonder, I often think, that any clear memories at all remain. The one who could have been of most help to me in writing my impressions of the Moon was Jamaro Bumblelily, the giant moth who carried us there. But as he was nowhere near me when I set to work upon this book I decided I had better not consider the particular wishes of Jip, Gub-Gub, my mother, Matthew or any one else, but set the story down in my own way. Clearly the tale must be in any case an imperfect, incomplete one. And the only thing to do is to go forward with it, step by step, to the best of my recollection, from where the great insect hovered, with our beating hearts pressed close against his broad back, over the near and glowing landscape of the Moon.

Greg Rossel grew up cruising the waters of New York Harbor and spending time in the boatyards on the south shore of Staten Island where economics (more than anything else) made wooden boats the craft of choice. He makes his home in Maine where he specializes in the construction and repair of small wooden boats, as well as writing for several publications. Greg has been an instructor at WoodenBoat School in Maine since the mid-1980's, teaching lofting, skiff building, and the "Fundamentals of Boatbuilding".

After a three-year voyage, Doctor Dolittle sets his Puddlesby garden to rights and and makes it the site of an animal-run zoo. With the help of his friends, he also tackles a mystery at nearby Moorsden Manor.

Doctor Dolittle is determined to continue the work he started on the Moon to find the secret of everlasting life. But to carry on, he must consult Mudface, the ancient turtle who lives in the Secret Lake in Africa. And when the doctor hears that Mudface has been burried during an Earthquake, the Doctor's journey becomes an emergancy rescue mission

On a succession of evenings, the animals settle into Doctor Dolittle's kitchen to hear Gub-Gub the pig read parts of his book on food.