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Books

JUST RELEASED

From Rocks to Rockets cover

Osprey Books has re-released the author's 1963 classic Gilkerson On War under the new title From Rocks to Rockets, in reformatted United Kingdom and North American editions.

"William Gilkerson takes the history of the human race and puts it in words and pictures that are at once meaningful, sometimes profound and always funny. His pen takes us from cavemen armed with rocks to modern bombs and rockets and epicts the chaos throughout." Available in bookstores and online as of October 20, 2008.

 

PIRATE'S PASSAGE UPDATE & NEWS

 

Steeped in wit, philosophy and mystical ambiguity, William Gilkerson’s Pirate’s Passage takes a maverick approach to history. A challenging children’s novel with a dangerous edge, Pirate’s Passage is a work of genius, a benchmark in Canadian literature.
Pirates' Passage back cover
Pirates' Passage front cover

Pirate’s Passage, by William Gilkerson, Trumpeter Books, Boston, 2006
(distributed by Random House) 364 pages, with 50 line illustrations.

After winning the Governor General's Award for Children's Literature in 2006, Pirate's Passage has been reprinted in several editions in North America and abroad (most recently in Russian), and is currently being made into a 10-part animated film series by the actor Donald Sutherland, whose voice is that of the captain, the book's storyteller. The book itself has gethered scores of favorable reviews, all of which have been best summarized by columnist and reviewer Silver Donald Cameron in his column of April 27, 2008:

One Man's Pirate is Another's King

Laws are made, says the old maxim, by those who have the power to enforce them.

The first laws, says Captain Charles Johnson, were probably made by a caveman who attacked the caveman on the other side of the river, took everything he had, and made the rule that the river belonged to him and his family, of course. So there came government, and anybody from the other side of the river who did the same thing was a criminal committing an act of piracy.

Johnson wonders who was the greatest pirate of the Renaissance. Was it Philip of Spain, who looted the Americas? Or Elizabeth I of England, who sent out fleets to loot the looters? Or Drake, the greatest looter of them all?

Captain Johnson is the central figure in Pirate's Passage, the deliciously subversive book by South Shore writer William Gilkerson which won the 2006 Governor-General's Award for Children's Literature. Spectacularly-successful thieves, Johnson says, become monarchs, emperors and governments. Less successful thieves become criminals. If they're sailors, they're called pirates. The definitions come from codes of law and the history books, which are written by the winners.

If I had been told all this when I was a boy, it would have saved me a lot of later confusion. But I don't know many children's books as forthright and provocative as Pirate's Passage.

The novel begins when Captain Johnson's little yawl surfs into the village of Grey Rocks in a November storm in 1952. He stays the winter at the Admiral Anson Inn, where he befriends Jim, the 12-year-old son of the widowed innkeeper. Are there echoes of Treasure Island here? Oh, yes.

Jim is writing a school essay about pirates. Captain Johnson offers to help and not only with schoolwork. The historic inn is in decline, and the village dictator, who heads a local clan named Moehner (pronounced meaner), is manipulating police, firemen and health inspectors, squeezing Jim's mother to sell. Captain Johnson applies his strategic intelligence to thwarting the Moehners.

Meanwhile, Jim gets an astonishing view of piracy. In 1724, a Captain Charles Johnson published an authoritative General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates and the Captain Johnson of 1952 eerily echoes his namesake. He sometimes implies that he is becoming younger again, raising the tantalizing possibility that he may indeed be the same man, having found some means to wax and wane in age.

The captain has a remarkable capacity to inject Jim straight into the scenes he describes. Again and again, Jim finds himself reasoning like a pirate and planning like a pirate and inhabiting the subsequent action so vividly that he actually seems to live it. The experience, Jim says, rattled my notions of reality, as it is clearly meant to do.

Indeed, the point of these intense conversations is the captain's insistence that Jim discard conventional thinking, and learn to see the world clearly and accurately. Once, for instance, Jim comments that the merchant sailor's condition in the 18th century seems unfair, and should be changed.

Changed? the captain retorts. What's to change? The way of the world? Don't overtax your brains with how things should be; you're going to need all the brain power you've got just trying to figure out how things actually are.

According to Johnson, the Brotherhood of freebooters created the world's first true democracy at a time when most Europeans were utter pawns of absolute monarchs. The captain quotes with approval Captain Samuel Bellamy's denunciation of those who live within the laws established by the wealthy as a parcel of hen-hearted numskulls. The wealthy, he says, vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?"

Good question. And if you think piracy and slavery are behind us, says the captain, think again. Starting with the Moehners and ending with a crew of armed thugs in a motorboat off Boston, Jim meets all manner of contemporary pirates. In the end, says the captain, there's no such thing as the pirates. There's just Òthem as lives in the seams and spaces between the rules...in governments, churches, academies, businesses, tennis clubs, and pub societ Ð pirates ready to come out and ransack from the spaces between the spaces.

The pirates are among us, and our best defenses are speed, courage and surprise. Pirate's Passage a glorious romp and a vivid historical tale Ð and a foundation text in the political philosophy of survival. No doubt we have met our pirates already. Perhaps we are pirates ourselves, forsooth, in our moments of courage and freedom.

Author: Silver Donald Cameron for The Nova Scotian, April 27, 2008

 

NEW WORK (due for release in 2009)

Tundra books is producing the artist/author's A Thousand Years of Pirates, which consists of the many colour pictures that were made for Pirate's Passage but not printed in it plus many more on the same theme. The collection was first displayed in the "Under the Black Flag" exhibition shown in turn by the South Seaport Museum, NY; the Mariners' Museum of Newport News; and Philadelphia's Independence Seaport Museum. Additional pictures were made for the new book, which the publisher is producing in large format, echoing the book-makers craft of a former time, some eighty pictures are tied together by text written for bedtime reading.

Books by William Gilkerson that are still in print should be ordered from the publishers listed. Out-of-print titles may generally be located from one or another of the bookfinding services that are available on the Web.

In reverse chronological order, William Gilkerson's previous books include:
  • Ultimate Voyage

    Ultimate Voyage, Shambhala Publications, Boston, 1998. Subtitled. A Book of Five Mariners, this is the artist's first novel, a maritime historical yarn with color frontispiece and brush and ink drawings throughout. With 326 pages in 6" x 9" format. Hardbound.
  • Ultimate Voyage

    Boarders Away (Volume I & II), Andrew Mowbray, Inc., Lincoln, R.I., 1991.
    The first volume, subtitled With Steel - the edged weapons and polearms of the classical age of fighting sail, 1626-1826...tracing their development in the navies of England and the United States, researches this subject for the first time. 176 pages, in 8½" x 11" format, and hundreds of illustrations, both photos and drawings, in color and black and white. Hardbound.



    • Amazon
  • Ultimate Voyage

    The second volume, subtitled With Fire, continues pioneering research of the previous work, dealing with the firearms and combustibles of the sailing navies. With 332 pages in the same format as the first volume, but double the text and the number of illustrations. These two books have become the standard source references in this field of arms study. Hardbound.



    • Amazon
  • The Ships of John Paul Jones

    The Ships of John Paul Jones, Naval Institute Press and the Beverley R. Robinson Collection, U.S. Naval Academy Museum 1987. Portrays all of Jones's ships, as well as other vessels that he sailed on, with accompanying story text by the artist; 88 pages in 9" x 11½" format, with 12 full color plates and dozens of duotone and line plates; hardbound.

  • An Arctic Whaling Sketchbook, Edward J. Lefkowicz, Inc., Fairhaven, 1983. Includes artist's remarks regarding the studies prepared for American Whalers in the Western Arctic, plus reproductions of scores of drawings; 56 pages in 15" x 12" format, two-color, in an edition limited to 120 copies, hardbound.

  • American Whalers in the Western Arctic, Edward J. Lefkowicz, Inc., Fairhaven, 1983. Subtitled: The final epoch of the great American sailing whaling fleet, an anecdotal history by John R. Bockstoce, with portfolio of 12 color plates by Gilkerson plus numerous brush and ink drawings throughout. Published with 56 pages in elephant folio, 15" x 19" format, in an edition limited to 400 copies, hardbound.

  • Maritime Arts by William Gilkerson, Published by the Peabody Museum of Salem, 1981. Text and reproductions (in color and black and white) covering all work which appeared in the museum's 1981 one-man show by the artist. 96 pages in 8½" x 11" format, published in both softbound and a limited hardbound edition.The Scrimshander

  • The Scrimshander, Troubador Press, San Francisco, 1975. Subtitled: The nautical ivory worker and his art of scrimshaw, historical and contemporary. Includes text on old and new scrimshaw, and primarily a photographic, portfolio in black and white of Gilkerson scrimshaw. Contains 124 pages in 8" x 10" format in a hard and soft bound edition. In 1978 a second edition was published containing many revisions and additional work: soft- bound.

For out of print titles search for "Gilkerson" at:

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