MARITIME HISTORIAN & AUTHOR GAVIN MCLEAN

REPORTS ON HIS RECENT CRUISE & AVAILABILITY OF BOOKS

In the days when ‘Home boats’ linked New Zealand and Britain, the ship’s library was a welcome alternative to shuffleboard or deck quoits. A cheesy publicity photo for the New Zealand Shipping Company in the 1950s showed a clubbable chap puffing on his pipe, book in hand in a Rangi-boat’s library.

Modern cruise ships offer more diversions than the old liners, but their libraries play an important part in shipboard life. The ships visiting New Zealand every summer vary in their offerings. Holland America Line’s libraries are stocked by real librarians, are generously-sized and feature an intelligent selection of Australian and New Zealand titles.

On a 2007 guest lecturing gig on the Statendam, I left my own carry-onboard selection in my bags and devoured the ship’s modern fiction, history and Library of America editions.
Not all ships match HAL’s.

On a ship twice the Statendam’s size, the library was half her size and bulked out by discarded passengers’ books, few of them in English.

On the swanky Seven Seas Voyager last week, the library was a small but welcoming place, with an emphasis on American fiction, politics and history, but also carrying a few top-notch European historians such as Linda Colley and Jacques Barzun.

It was also busy. Very. It’s common to see people carrying books to the breakfast table, into the lounges where leather chairs make comfy bookish roosts between shows, and of course around the pool, watching the sea miles slip by. Sony Readers and the E-Kindle have yet to storm this bastion. It’s not the passengers’ age (US and British grandparents Skype to family and download emails with the best of them), but the sheer durability and portability of the book. As a mate says, you can’t swat a mozzie with a screen (unless you want to fork out $100s in repairs!)

Reading chair, and accessories, off Tahiti last week. Photos - Gavin McLean.

FOOTNOTE.

Gavin, if you ever need a stand in The Bookman is available!