The Gallica Digital Library

Oxford rowers at Putney

HTBS’s Hélène Rémond has found a real gem that she would like to share with you. Hélène writes,

Founded in 1997, the Gallica digital library from the National Library of France offers over a million documents accessible for free: Books, Manuscripts, Maps, Images, Newspapers, Magazines, Periodicals and more.

Cambridge oarsmen, 1932

Lovers of rowing history can browse the pages at http://gallica.bnf.fr/?&lang=EN for the English version. With keywords like “aviron” for French documents, or “rowing”, you will find many images and book references. There is detailed information as to the author and the date of publication. You can browse the topic, forward it through social networks, get a copy of a document is subject to conditions... Enjoy !

To get more information in English about this digital library, please click here.

Picture on the left shows a Polish coxed four, 1932.

More Rowing Books Online

Talking about Tim Koch’s interesting entry about R.C Lehmann’s books online, Bernard Hempseed of New Zealand sent me an exciting link the other day where other old, and some very rare, rowing books can be found. Bernard writes,

“I was having a look around on the net the other day and found something I had not come across before. This site - Archive.org - I have looked at before and they have quite a lot of books on rowing.

You can read these online or download them. A PDF file is usually available and this can be saved or printed out. The easiest to download is plain text but these have only been OCR’ed and there are lots of errors in them. However, sometimes this is useful as not all PDF’s are easy to print. If you print something out and bind it, you have yourself a rowing book.”

I have spent a thrilling time looking at these ‘goodies’ – thank you, Bernard for sharing!

Buy Rowing Stuff!

Now and then, we look for something special to buy that has to do with rowing: new sculls, a fancy rowing tie, a new rowing book, a new rowing kit, etc. To help you out, I have added a new feature on the right, Buy Rowing Stuff, with links to different companies that are selling 'stuff' for rowers. More companies will be added after time. I would like to mention that none of these companies have in any way paid me or given me 'stuff' to be listed here. I have no association with any of them, and I will in no way take any responsibility for 'faulty' merchandise.

Rowing Online

Some years back I was subscribing to and writing book reviews and small pieces for the beautiful magazine Maritime Life and Traditions. I was sad when it went down the pipes in 2006. Somehow the National Maritime Historical Society’s magazine Sea History started to come instead, I guess as compensation, but when they wanted me to subscribe to it, I politely declined. To me, Sea History, although a nice publication, never came close to what Maritime Life and Traditions used to be, a first-class publication with well-written articles and wonderful illustrations in colour. On Friday, the latest issue of Sea History, No. 133, Winter 2010-11, showed up in the mail box. With the magazine came a letter asking me to ‘come back’ as a subscriber.

Yesterday, I had the time to flip through the magazine, and on page 50 I saw an interesting article by Peter McCracken, “Competitive Rowing Online”. McCracken writes “Competitive rowing, like any pastime, has an online presence these days. Rowing history, curiously, is not well represented online, but a 20004 essay titled “The Danerously Neglected Legacy of Rowing” at rowinghistory.net provides some considerations as to why this is so.” Even though Peter McCracken never mentions the name of the author of that great article, Thomas E. Weil, McCracken is right, the article gives the reader a lot to think about.

Then follows a list with descriptions of valuable rowing links (many you will find under my ‘Good Rowing Links’ on the right). Allow me to here quote McCracken: River & Rowing Museum; Fishmongers’ Company (which organise The Doggett’s Coat and Badge Race); Rowing History (The Friends of Rowing History); the National Rowing Foundation; Row2K; Henley Royal Regatta; The Boat Race; Head of the Charles; Pocock Racing Shells; Northwest Maritime Center; USRowing; Rowing Canada; British Rowing; 2012 London Olympic Rowing; and FISA World Rowing. Two rowing blogs are also mentioned in the article: Chris Partridge’s Rowing for Pleasure and HTBS (the blog you are on right now.)

Peter McCracken is happy to welcome other suggestions, please e-mail him at peter@shipindex.org