My Lively Lady - SIGNED

My Lively Lady by Alec Rose, published by the Nautical Publishing Company in 1968, is the story of one man, one yacht, a very large quantity of ocean and the sort of cheerful British determination that tends to begin with somebody saying, “Well, I thought I might have a go.”

Alec Rose became one of the great popular sailing figures of the 1960s after taking his yacht Lively Lady around the world. This was not a leisurely cruise involving cocktails, marina restaurants and somebody appearing each morning to fluff the cushions. It was long-distance solo sailing of the old-fashioned variety: navigation, weather, mechanical problems, exhaustion, loneliness and the persistent inconvenience of the sea refusing to behave itself.

Rose was not the archetypal professional adventurer emerging from some grand institution with a fleet of sponsors behind him. He was a greengrocer from Portsmouth who happened to possess an impressive appetite for sailing and the apparently unreasonable belief that crossing enormous stretches of ocean alone was a worthwhile use of one’s time.

That is a large part of the book’s charm. My Lively Lady is not merely a record of miles sailed and ports visited, but a very human account of the practical business of keeping both boat and sailor functioning while thousands of miles from home. There is weather to endure, equipment to repair, decisions to make and the constant possibility that something relatively small may become extremely important when the nearest chandlery is somewhere beyond the horizon.

His voyage captured the imagination of the British public, and when Rose returned home in 1968 he did so as a national celebrity. It was an era when individual sailors could still become household names simply by going somewhere extraordinarily difficult in a relatively small boat and surviving the experience. No social-media team was required, no drone footage was uploaded from mid-Atlantic, and nobody had to remind viewers to like and subscribe.

Read now, the book belongs to a fascinating period in sailing history when ocean voyaging was becoming accessible to determined amateurs but remained considerably less technologically assisted than it is today. Navigation involved charts and instruments rather than casually consulting a glowing screen to discover exactly where one was. Weather information was limited, communications were sparse, and Google Maps remained several decades away from politely informing anyone that the next turning was in 2,800 nautical miles.

The result is both an adventure story and a snapshot of a particular kind of mid-twentieth-century optimism: the belief that with enough preparation, persistence and tea, an ordinary person might attempt something thoroughly unreasonable and get away with it.

This copy has the additional attraction of being SIGNED by Alec Rose, giving it rather more personality than the average second-hand sailing book. Signatures naturally have a habit of turning an otherwise ordinary copy into something collectors begin examining much more carefully while trying not to look too excited.

Condition: Good. This is a genuine vintage copy from 1968 and shows the sort of age and handling one would reasonably expect after more than half a century. It has survived rather better than many yachts, marriages and 1960s hairstyles, and remains a sound and appealing copy for reading or collecting.

ISBN: 0245595651.

A particularly nice find for collectors of maritime books, sailing history, solo voyaging, British adventure writing and signed books, or anyone who believes that going around the world alone in a small yacht sounds preferable to spending a wet weekend in a caravan.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where the books have usually travelled less far than Alec Rose, but occasionally come with better paperwork.

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