Boating Magazines
A generous donor (George from Wickford, Essex) has gifted us a large collection of boating magazines. These run from the 1960s to the 1990s and are mostly Practical Boat Owner (PBO), but in all there were twenty-odd titles. The first thing to strike me were the permutations of titles that could have ‘boat’, or ‘yacht’ in the title…
As with all magazine genres, it was a brutal world and circulation was all. PBO started in 1967 and is still running as a monthly today. Our donation started with the very first issue and went up to 1995 with only a few missing. We only had a handful of PBOs so this boosts our set rather! The next numerous set was for Yachting Monthly (72 copies, 1969 to 1992). This started in 1898 and is still going now. We also had fifteen copies of Boat magazine, a monthly, with ours running from its earliest days in 1974 until 1978. It didn’t last much longer before being absorbed by PBO in 1979. Funnily enough, I recognised the style of Boat – it looked like Hot Car, but for boats, and indeed, it was the same editor (Tony Bostock) and publisher. Maybe it should have been called Hot Boat…
In addition we now have the monthly Small Boat, some 59 copies from 1969 to 1976. This started in 1969 (we have issue #2) but what happened after 1976 is anyone’s guess. A magazine Small Boats (note the plural, and see what I mean about the permutations!) is available today, but this is American and I don’t think is related. What we do know is that Light Craft magazine, another monthly for which we have three copies from 1968, was absorbed by Small Boat.
Otherwise, of the glossy magazines, we have Yachts and Yachting (12 copies, 1972 to 1979); Offshore Sailing (the first three issues from 1981); Boats (the first seven copies from 1986); Classic Boat (3 copies from 1995); Motor Boat and Yachting (4 copies, 1973 to 1994); Yatching World (5 copies, 1971 to 1981); Yachts and Equipment (1 copy, 1994); What Boat (1 copy, 1988);
Power and Sail (1 copy, 1974); Yacht and Boat Owner (3 copies, 1978), and another title absorbed by Small Boat; Boat International (2 copies, 1984 to 1985); and finally Dinghy International (1 copy from 1984). For the newspaper-format boating press, we have Boat News, a weekly costing 10p on its launch. We have the first one (including the dummy issue) from when it came out in March 1973, up to July 1973.
It took quite some time to sort and organise this lot, but we managed it! Just time, then, for a very small selection of the ads, mainly from PBO. They include an early one for Peter Storm, at the point where they latched on to the idea that practical waterproof clothing could be trendy too. We like the ad for Gordon Payne – so very 60s! – and we thought the one for Interspray was very clever.
