Boats with an Open Mind: Seventy-Five Unconventional Designs and Concepts [Paperback]

``Boat lovers who are used to designers who conceive the same boat over and over, camouflaged with a face-lifting here and there, will be amazed at Phil Bolger's diversity--Here are novel and wonderful boats.'' (Boatbuilder )

``Bolger has a way of seducing even the lay reader into thinking about and beginning to understand boat design.'' (Cruising World )

``. . .entertains, informs, and makes you think about boats in ways you probably thought weren't possible--Boats with an Open Mind is wonderful, its author priceless. (WoodenBoat )

Here are 75 novel and wonderful boats--some strange, some beautiful, all of them paragons of Philip Bolger's form-follows-function design philosophy. A planing microtrawler; a glass-galleried, beachable birdwatching boat; a fully enclosed ocean-cruising rowboat; cruising sailboats that take the ground at low tide; power, sail, and rowing boats from 6 to 95 feet--these are boats as only Bolger's unfettered imagination does them. This is the first collection of Bolger's work in almost 15 years. It is long overdue.

"Bolger is an eloquent writer and his comments run the gamut from hilarious to profound."--The Ensign

"Bolger brings a kind of youthful feeling to yacht design--he would rather make precedent than follow it."--WoodenBoat

"Bolger has a way of seducing even the lay reader into thinking about and beginning to understand boat design."--Cruising World

"Boat lovers who are used to designers who conceive the same boat over and over, camouflaged with a face-lifting here and there, will be amazed at Phil Bolger's diversity."--Boatbuilder

Here are 75 novel and wonderful boats--some strange, some beautiful, all of them paragons of Philip Bolger's form-follows-function design philosophy. A planing microtrawler; a glass-galleried, beachable birdwatching boat; a fully enclosed ocean-cruising rowboat; cruising sailboats that take the ground at low tide; power, sail, and rowing boats from 6 to 95 feet--these are boats as only Bolger's unfettered imagination does them. This is the first collection of Bolger's work in almost 15 years. It is long overdue.

"Bolger is an eloquent writer and his comments run the gamut from hilarious to profound."--The Ensign

"Bolger brings a kind of youthful feeling to yacht design--he would rather make precedent than follow it."--WoodenBoat

"Bolger has a way of seducing even the lay reader into thinking about and beginning to understand boat design."--Cruising World

"Boat lovers who are used to designers who conceive the same boat over and over, camouflaged with a face-lifting here and there, will be amazed at Phil Bolger's diversity."--Boatbuilder

Philip C. Bolger was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1927. He became obsessed with boat design not long after. He now works in a sculpture garden of experimental boats of his imagining, still in Gloucester. His hobbies are history, prophecy, and fantasy. In the spring of 1994 he married and went into partnership with Susanne Altenburger, whose tastes and amusements are similar but not identical.