Abstract
In 2007, Liverpool celebrated its 800th anniversary, and the following year it was European Capital of Culture. These events led to a surge of publications, from the modest to the extravagant, which tempt one to question whether there is a for any more, especially when that the market already contained Collard’s own Mersey Shipping: the Twilight Years (1999).
With the exception of some reproduced maritime advertising material, theis new book is a picture book pure and simple. There is nothing wrong with that: the old cliché about a thousand words still has some truth in it. However, in a journal such as IJMH it is necessary to consider the picture book in a more critical light: not just with regard to the quality of images (though that is important) but also who would find it useful and for what.
The quality varies, as it necessarily would, since the images originate over some two and a half centuries, and some suffer from the fact that when 4 ASA was a fast film, ships were hardly ever completely still, even when berthed. If sharpness is central, then the author’s own recent colour images are the best by a long way. Less satisfactory are the recent colour reproductions of black and white prints, producing a sepia-tinted view. Unfortunately the degree of ‘tinting’ varies, so some of them just look faded. On the credit side, the book is not so shiny as to be difficult to read, a common failing in picture books.
There are two ways of approaching the production of a book such as this: the author may start with a text and fit the illustrations to it, or she/he may start with the pictures and provide explanatory text. Both approaches labour under the same difficulty, that it can be very difficult to provide ‘captions’ which exhibit any measure of standardization. Collard’s work has captions varying between one and twelve lines, which reflect the interest or importance of the subject but might also be governed by the author’s necessarily partial knowledge: books on ships and shipping present huge scope for pedantry and the wise author avoids trouble. This review takes little account of such matters, but does notice a picture of PS Waverley (p. 92) described as ‘at anchor’ when anyone can see the bow wave. As it happens, the caption is correct, and the ‘wave’ is the result of stemming the Mersey’s fearsome ebb tide: such things might be explained.
The Mersey Docks & Harbour Board collection at Merseyside Maritime Museum ‘cuts off’ in 1972, resulting in many picture books being weak after that date. Here Collard serves us well: Mersey Shipping through Time is relatively strong in such areas as recent warship and fleet auxiliary activity on the river and visits of Cunarders of the current fleet.
The final reckoning of the usefulness of books such as these is their usability. Sadly, this new work not only lacks an index or a table of contents, it does not even have (as Collard’s earlier work does) chapter headings. Nor does it have chapters. One might argue the relative merits of chronological versus thematic arrangements and the title of this work clearly indicates a chronological arrangement, but in fact it has no arrangement at all. The final verdict must be that it is an attractive book, but for the professional reader it is not a useful one.