Book By Its Cover » Paper Captain

11.21.08

Juliette Cezzar

Quick thing to note: PictureBox is having a Massive Visual Book and Magazine Sale this weekend- hundreds of books at very low prices. You can find out more here. See you there!

I think the market for this book is probably nerdy junior high boys but I love it. The back half is punch out paper pieces that you can construct your own boats with. From viking ships, to warships to submarines, all the little pieces fold up and connect to make paper models. I especially love the container ship because there’s a whole page of those containers, complete with tiny logos, to punch out and pile for the trip across your wooden floor ocean. I will never punch these out because I like how they look on the page too much- of course. Plus who has the time! The front of the book has a wealth of information about boats: how they work, famous boat stats, all these international maritime flags, and then big photos of shipwrecks that make you say wow aloud without realizing it. I was trying to think of a little cousin of mine that would die for this book but they have all moved on to illegally downloading games for their iphones. Then I remembered my husband who last year constructed his own polygons out of paper- I mean the 20 sided kind. The same guy who couldn’t thank me enough for surprising him with a moon globe. Now I know who gets this book come the holidays. You can get one for your nerdy husband here.
boat boat7
boat9 boat2
boat8 boat4

10 Comments

11/21/08 11:07am

Maria wrote

Thank you for sharing this book with us! It’s me, who would die for it : )

11/21/08 11:31am

marri wrote

thank you, julia! i had ZERO ideas for holiday gifts for the boy so far this year. ordered! (and you know i will end up using it more than he does, ha!)

11/21/08 11:46am

rui vitorino santos wrote

its on this occasions that i think that iÂ´m living on the wrong place. :-(

11/22/08 5:36pm

samantha hahn wrote

Hey Julia,
Dave an I took a blustery walk over there this afternoon and perused they’re lovely selection. I picked up two treasures for only $10 total!! Thanks for the info. Sadly they’re closing. Tough times. I hope they sell all of their great books and zines…
XO,
Samantha

12/10/08 10:00pm

leo wrote

now they have a paper captain

12/10/08 10:01pm

leo wrote

i meant paper pilot

12/15/08 9:35pm

Ben Weeks wrote

I bought Paper Pilot for my brother who is a pilot one Christmas. This year I was pleased to get this book for my fiance who travelled around the world by boat!

06/13/09 2:52pm

cole wrote

i think this book is dumb. i cant build the dam thing

06/27/09 3:17am

Gabrielle wrote

This is a beautiful book… I’m a hardcore paper engineering enthusiast, so I love this trend in well-designed model building books that’s emerged in the past year or so.

BUT, and there is a big but, when I attempted to build one of the boats from this book today, the “USS Enterprise”, I discovered there are pieces missing! By missing, I mean they never existed. Each boat model project has 1-4 pages of punch-out parts and a small color-coded diagram of how the pieces are assembled. Before I built the model, I noticed there was level of the boat in the diagram which I couldn’t find amongst the punch-out pieces. I thought that perhaps the diagram just wasn’t clear, and that once I actually began gluing and assembling, the construction would become clear. But no! there really aren’t enough pieces! I examined the binding edges to make sure there wasn’t a page missing or torn out, but this isn’t the case. I build complex architectural models all the time, and this simple model literally can’t be built.

In short– buy this book if you like attractive design books. don’t buy it if you just want to make the boats!

12/27/09 10:57pm

Nathan wrote

YES! like the above poster THERE ARE PIECES MISSING!!! reallly! I looked everywhere I was very disappointed, I mean the aircraft carrier is the best one. Then on the next boat I tried another piece missing, I hope if I contact the authors I can get a print out of them .. But yes the book is great I love all those pictures, makes great reference photos . I really like paper models, which is why I got the book but I really hope I can find a way to get those pieces..

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