On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of its original publication, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University has issued a new edition of Lawrence C. Wroth's Way of a Ship (1937), the foundational bibliographic essay on the literature of navigation science, along with a reprint of Some American Contributions to the Art of Navigation, 1519-1802 (1947). A prolific writer, well known for his graceful style and extensive historical knowledge, Wroth served as Director and Librarian of the JCB from 1924 to 1957.

The Way of a Ship has been celebrated for its graceful brevity in dealing with the complex history of nautical science. Its origin in an exhibition at the John Carter Brown Library is evident in the arrangement of the chapters, each of which provides a short exposition on topics such as "The Search for an Infallible Method of Determining Longitude," "Prime Meridians of Earlier Days," "Charts of the Ancient World," and "The Mariners Instruments."

Several more recent studies of early modern maritime history, science, and literature owe a great debt to the authority of Way of a Ship, but Wroth's essay has also served as the basis for the development of some of the most significant collections of books on the history and science of navigation, including the Henry C. Taylor Collection, now at the Beinecke Library at Yale.

For many years, Lawrence Wroth worked on a revision to Way of a Ship that never made it to publication. Professor John B. Hattendorf, the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI, has pieced together Wroth's manuscript notes and corrections to the original text to create this edition. To the revised essay, Hattendorf has added an index, a list of the books on navigation that are cited in the text, and a new Foreword. New reproductions of illustrations and title pages - from the Collection of the John Carter Brown Library -- are distributed throughout the volume, which was designed by Mark Argetsinger (Rochester, NY). Only one thousand copies were printed in the US by Capital Offset (Concord, NH). It is handsomely bound in navy blue cloth with gold stamping.