Success! Here’s your eBook.
(plus a little more about Off Center Harbor…)
The Common Sense of Yacht Design – Part 1
by L. Francis Herreshoff
Contains over 390 photographs, plans, and designs.
NOTE: We recommend viewing on a computer in full page mode, so be sure to click on the
expand button — 
. To exit full page mode, press the escape (esc) key on your keyboard.
THE COMMON SENSE OF YACHT DESIGN – 1
As the new editor of The Rudder magazine, one of Boris Lauer-Leonardi’s many great moves was to encourage L. Francis Herreshoff to design and write.
His first series of articles, called The Common Sense of Yacht Design, began in the March 1944 issue and continued chapter-by-chapter until January 1948. The Rudder reprinted the first half of those articles in book form in 1946 and the remainder as Volume II in 1948.
Herreshoff’s writing is non-technical, lucid, and opinionated—great reading, written by an author who knew what he was talking about and based on a lifetime of experience with wooden yachts. He spoke to his “gentle readers” in a way they could easily understand.
“The Common Sense of Yacht Design” became a classic and its content timeless.
After The Rudder, Caravan Maritime reprinted Common Sense in a single volume. But both that version and the original have long been out of print.
After learning that the book was no longer constrained by copyright, we set about to create this digital version by having pristine copies of the original edition scanned. We present them here for Off Center Harbor members to learn from and to enjoy.
L. Francis covers more ground than is indicated by these books’ printed indexes. In this digital edition, you can search for each and every word by clicking on the eyeglass in the righthand corner (search feature is not yet available on mobile devices). And, of course, you can zoom to enlarge the illustrations to make them more readable.