Here is the book that launched 15,000 ships. In truth, they were tiny ships that fit into bottles, but these ships (or at least their builders) found out how to get them in there from this volume.

This how-to book was one of those impossible things that can happen to an author. Fact is, someone asked me to make them a ship-in-a-bottle and I had no idea how it was done. I scouted around looking for information on technique and all I could find was an article written by an old sea captain in a 1933 Popular Mechanics Magazine. I used this article as my guide and actually produced a bottled ship, but I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a suitable book or booklet on the subject, so I embarked on the project hoping to get a booklet maker to buy the idea.

There was a well-known booklet maker (Walter T. Foster Art Books) in Tustin, a community on the just southeast of Los Angeles, and in 1970 I trekked up there with my offering to show them. I actually met Mr. Foster, and he just chuckled. He said that his first print run was always 10,000 copies and if anything was hard he would receive 10,000 letters complaining, and my work was too hard. But then he said, “I like the idea, but suggest that you take it to a real book publisher”. He suggested that I dig out a copy of Writer’s Market and look for publishers that do “How-To” books. Following his advice I selected McGraw-Hill and timidly offered them my modest manuscript. To my surprise they liked the idea but wanted more content. To this end they assigned me to an editor (an English guy whose uncle made bottled ships) who now coaxed me through the writing and illustration needed to produce a “real” book.

To make a long story short, McGraw sold the completed book to David & Charles, Ltd, a well know British publisher and they resold the rights to Verlag Delius Klasing, a German publisher who translated it into that language. Altogether McGraw printed 15,000 copies, David & Charles, 15,000 and the Germans another 20,000. Finally, when the rights were returned to me, I published another 10,000. So we know that there are 60,000 copies of this book are out there, and the best guess is that one out of every four buyers built and bottled one or more models- hence my 15,000 ships guess.

If this art-form interests you, get hold of a used (it is now out-of-print) copy of the book through Amazon.com and get busy. The process DOES NOT require patience, since you get too interested to become bored, and only requires minimal tools-most of which you make yourself. If you want to see some examples of others bottled ship go to www.shipsinbottles.org and www.folkartinbottles.com, and you can also join The Ships-In-Bottles Association of America (an application is on the website), an outfit I co-founded in 1982.

Finally, remember, if you do bottle a ship or other object it will probably still be around 500 years from now. What a memorial!

I think we are all curious about why we are here. Was our birth planned or was it an accident?

Of course, few of us ever actually find the answer. Either we never ask mom or pop, or if we do the answer is evasive. Then again, sometimes the answer is not evasive, but it could still be misleading. What parent wants to tell a child that he/she was an accident, so we are always left with doubt. But sometimes circumstances may indicate the climate at the time of conception, and raise hope that maybe, just maybe, you are not the result of a mistake.

Considering that my sister was born in 1917 and I was born in 1926, I am no stranger to this problem. How come nine years intervened before I came along? It always looked like a mistake to me. It would to anybody! But then some information came to my attention that gave me hope that perhaps I really was a planned baby. That hope came from the New Yorker Magazine.

For many years I had heard that my father was published in the first issue of the New Yorker. I never paid a great deal of attention to that since there were other things to occupy my mind like a long career in the navy , moving here and there as part of it, marrying, divorcing, remarrying, raising and educating my children, and later, my civilian occupations. But then things slowed down. I sold my business, remarried for the third time, the kids went on to lead their own lives and like a lot of older folk I began to think about the genealogy of the family and who did what.

Most families pass along folders full of old newspaper clippings, faded photos, hair clippings, first teeth and other little sentimentalities that families like to keep. My parents and grandparents were no different, so I inherited a few cardboard boxes full of miscellany that was the representation of the family past. Going though this stuff is slow work, old papers crumble, semi-identified relatives and friends occupy time to try to re-identify, visiting kids dig in and rearrange things and the stacks are not in any chronological order anyway. Nevertheless the work progressed, and among the documents I came upon a couple of old mimeographed papers upon which my Dad had written, “This shows how Harold Ross was looking about, trying to find the right identity for the New Yorker”. The mimeographed sheets were rough guidelines that Ross was issuing to his editorial staff and to potential contributors. Wow – maybe the stuff about Dad and the first issue of the New Yorker had some basis for fact!

Next step was a letter to the New Yorker. Was my Dad in the first issue? The initial answer was “No, he was not.”, but they sent me a reprinted copy of that first edition and the information that he had four cartoons published in the magazine in the issues of December 5, 1925; January 30, 1926; October 30, 1926 and November 6, 1926. Well that scotched the idea that dad’s work might have appeared in the first issue of the magazine. I forgot about it for a few months but then I began to read through that February 21, 1925 magazine and – Gulp! – there it was on page 11. It was a short, two column article entitled, A Boon to Babbitts, by Ernest F. Hubbard. The New Yorker history folks had somehow missed it.

The old unanswered question crept back into my mind. Was I a mistake? Maybe that article in the first issue New Yorker and the later cartoons had some bearing on my existence? In 1925 my dad was still a young guy working his way up as a writer in a hat magazine. Money could not have been abundant. He was married, had a wife and a young daughter to raise. More income would be needed to increase the family size . Now here was money, New Yorker money. My day brightened. I was born on January 15, 1926, about 10 months after that first article appeared. The folks would have had plenty of time to snuggle up in bed, dreaming about this new source of income and about the future kid. Planned parenthood at its finest.

I gave thanks to Harold Ross. He must have been some kind of guy! But then that lingering doubt returned. If I was here as the result of the New Yorker article and its benevolent editor, how come they did not name me Harold or Ross? Wherefrom Donald? No one will ever know and hardly anyone but me will care. We are back to square one, but Ross Hubbard wouldn’t have had a bad ring to it!