Join us in creating
the Maritime Research Center
at Friend Memorial Public Library
The Maritime Research Center will be one of the nation’s most important private collections of materials and photographs related to wooden boat and ship design, construction operation, and history.
The center will include the rare and extensive maritime research library donated by Jon Wilson, founder and former owner of the renowned WoodenBoat magazine and WoodenBoat School, and more than 155,000 images from award-winning maritime photographer Benjamin Mendlowitz. Additional materials of maritime significance will be welcomed in the future.
The Maritime Research Center will be housed in a small multi-use portion of the library’s planned Annex, and unlike maritime collections in museum settings, these collections will be accessible to the public during normal library hours.
“The Maritime Research Center is an incomparable resource for understanding some of the very traditions of this town.”
— Jon Wilson, founder, WoodenBoat publications
Photo: Jon Wilson
The Research Value of This Collection
As a boatbuilder prior to founding WoodenBoat magazine, Jon Wilson began to assemble a private library of maritime books and associated materials. His love of boats, wooden boats in particular, and all things maritime inspired his collecting. After establishing WoodenBoat magazine, now world-renowned, and later WoodenBoat School, Jon housed the collection at WoodenBoat to be used by the writers and editors of WoodenBoat Publications and by visitors. It remains there to this day.
In 2022, Jon Wilson sold WoodenBoat Publications but retained his beloved library and began to consider relocating it, hoping to keep it intact and available. Sadly, despite having become one of the nation’s largest and most important collections of its kind, the library is no longer staffed by a librarian and is closed to public use altogether.
When Jon agreed to the Friend Memorial’s request to acquire the former WoodenBoat library, his stated intention was “to find a home for the collection that will preserve it and make it available for use.”
Today, the maritime library contains about 6,700 books, some rare and irreplaceable, that are fully cataloged using a slightly modified Library of Congress system so books of similar content are shelved next to each other. The books can be accessed either by a traditional card catalog or electronically by using an Excel file.
The wide range of topics include maritime and yachting histories, fisheries, seamanship, boatbuilding and repair, boat designers and design theory, rigging and sails, engines, and all types and sizes of watercraft. Also included are rare old books, yacht registers, and most-often-used periodicals such as Forest and Stream from 1873, The Rudder from 1904, and Yachting from 1917.
The collection’s magazine room also contains runs of other periodicals, many complete, such as Ash Breeze, American Neptune, Catboat Bulletin, Classic Boat, Friendship Sloop Days, Nautical Research Journal, Motorboating, Watercraft, Fore & Aft, Skipper, and Small Boat Journal. There also are several shelves of National Fisherman and Transactions of The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME).
Unique to this particular library and among its most useful compilations, are forty-three vertical file drawers containing technical information, correspondence, designer and builder biographies, clippings, and copies of the design pages from The Rudder, Yachting, and other maritime magazines filed by designers’ names (there are hundreds) from John Alden to Sparkman & Stephens, and L. Francis Herreshoff to Nelson Zimmer.
“We recognized a one-time opportunity to acquire one of the finest maritime libraries in the country.”
— Edwin DePasqual, President, Friend Memorial Public Library Board of Trustees
Photo: Benjamin Mendlowitz
From Lens to Library
For the past 42 years, award-winning maritime photographer Ben Mendlowitz has created the much-loved Calendar of Wooden Boats. He has recently offered his entire slide collection — some 155,000 images — to the Friend Memorial Public Library to become an element of the Maritime Research Center — and the library gladly accepted.
Ben’s slide collection represents his earliest work, covering the years 1979 to 2005, before he shifted from film photography to digital. The slides have been cataloged, labeled, prioritized, and stored in archival sleeves of 20 slides each.
The six fire-resistant, four-drawer file cabinets which house the slides are also included in Ben’s offer, and will easily fit inside the new library expansion.
After the collection arrives, it will undergo further selective scanning and cataloging by the library staff and volunteers. By this means, library patrons as well as the wider world will get convenient on-screen access to the strongest images, while those not selected can be viewed, as slides or scanned, upon request.
Ben’s slide collection covers boats and yachts that were active at the dawn of dthe wooden boat renaissance, dating back to within five years of the founding of WoodenBoat magazine itself. Together with Jon Wilson’s maritime library, it forms a complete package that awaits aficionados, students, writers, researchers, boat owners, and would-be owners.
After Ben’s digital images from 2005 onward have been added to the library’s collection, which he plans to accomplish in stages, there will be nearly a half century of exceptional photos, and it will be clear that very few major wooden yachts escaped his lens. You’ll find a wide range of commercial craft and smaller boats there as well.
It’s truly an amazing treasure, crammed to the gills with inspirational and artistic images from one of the world’s finest marine photographers.
“The Maritime Research Center will house an invaluable historical record of traditions significant and meaningful to Brooklin and to the maritime world.”
— Maynard Bray, Brooklin resident, author and maritime historian
Keeping this Maritime Treasure in Brooklin
The town of Brooklin is known throughout the western world for designing and building both pleasure and commercial vessels. Boats are built, used, repaired, and stored throughout the town. From its inception, Brooklin has been a boating community.
The Brooklin Keeping Society in its 2003 publication, BROOKLIN, says, “The livelihood of Brooklin people came from the sea. The first recorded boat was built in 1793, when John Allen and John Dority built the Trail at the head of Herrick’s Bay. By 1850, more than half the men in Brooklin were working on ships, and by 1876, no fewer than 46 vessels had been built within the town limits.”
Also located in Brooklin, the WoodenBoat School, founded in 1981, attracts over 750 students a year to a four-month schedule of classes for prospective and established boat builders, plus those interested in learning traditional seamanship skills and related crafts.
The Brooklin School, teaching pre-school through grade eight, offers classes in boatbuilding for seventh and eighth grade students both at its own facility and at WoodenBoat School.
