Kelsick Wood was a nineteenth-century Georgian shipbuilder in Maryport, Cumberland, with a private passion for painting. He combined his two loves in his journals, where shipyard contracts and inventories share their pages with beautiful and curious watercolour pictures. The Vanishing Age of Sail revels in the rich, textured story behind these little books. It shows how each small shipyard on Britain’s coast played its part in Britain’s economic expansion in the nineteenth century. It is also a personal tale, and the faces which look out from Kelsick’s journals remind us that these wooden ships and brigs carried the dreams and livelihoods of all those who owned, commanded and crewed them.

Simon Francis Brown’s highly visual title speaks immediately to lovers of maritime history, illustration and the Georgian era, drawing in daydreamers and doodlers alike.