Trawling the literature

Tales from the wilder shores of words

- SAM Llewellyn

December has come early this year. A heavy wind is buffeting the slates, and big seas are crunching up the kyle and bursting on the beach below this shed. I do not care, because the stove door is open, and the driftwood is spitting green, and I have got plenty to read.

I always have plenty to read, because as well as writing things for Practical Boat Owner and other leading periodicals, I am the editor of The Marine Quarterly, which is a sea journal full of stories and with hardly any pictures. People send you books if you are an editor, and the only downside of this fine state of affairs is that sometimes the books are so interesting that you forget to do any editing.

This is true of things published by the big battalions like Bloomsbury, who have used their mighty Harry Potter profits to finance works published under the Adlard Coles imprint-notably, this winter, Sailing the Shallows, Roger Barnes's excellent and evocative dinghy cruising manifesto. But there is an equal if not greater amount of fun to be gained from the works of smaller publishers, or even no publishers at all.

Julia Jones sails in the general vicinity of the earthly paradise known as Woodbridge, and owns Peter Duck