Launched! Paper Navigators is published!

A box of books arrived this week: author copies of my scholarly monograph, Discovery, Innovation, and the Victorian Admiralty: Paper Navigators, freshly published in Palgrave Macmillan’s Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History series! This thrills me for reasons well beyond the conventional high of seeing my name in print and the culmination of years of work:

it’s dedicated to my kids
the cover is a photograph from my own collection, taken at the National Archives (UK), of a document I use in the book
it tells the stories–sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic, sometimes cringey, always compelling–of Victorian Royal Navy and Admiralty employees whose names and adventures might otherwise never be known

Of course I want everyone to buy it and love it, but there’s time for that. Right now, I can’t think of a better way to announce its arrival than to reproduce my acknowledgement page and say thank you to the people and places who helped make it happen.

Thank you to the land on which this book was written. Thank you to the Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Anishinaabe peoples who imbued this land with traditions of curiosity, wisdom, and knowledge sharing. Thank you to Kahnien’kehàka scholar Ryan ‘Rye’ Barberstock for teaching me about the rich and continuing history of the peninsula on which I researched, wrote, and revised.

Thank you to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Defence Academic Research Programme for their financial support, and the Royal Military College of Canada for the gifts of time and encouragement. Thank you to Berghahn Publishers and the editors of Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, who published the first iteration of chapter Four.

Thank you to my fellow inhabitants of SSC33, R92, the temporary office space where most of this book was written.

Thank you to my kids, who kept it real.

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