Skip to main content

Is this book dire or dazzling? Read my review and get the inside dope

Faces of World's Captains

Author(s)
Kenji Myakoshi
Publisher
The Author
Edition / Year
1971
In the section labelled

Faces of World's Captains

Once in a while I come across a book whose oddity is charming rather than idiotic: Faces of World's Captains is one such. It records a series of drawings made by Kenji Miyakoshi when he was working as a harbour pilot in Tokyo Bay. Whenever he had piloted a vessel he would make a sketch of its captain from memory. Finally he had about 3000 drawings of which more than 600 are collected in this self-published volume. He says of his work:

It does not matter whether these are good or bad from the artistic point of view. What I am hoping for is that this notebook would serve as a good souvenir after I quit the job of pilot.

My copy was presented to a Captain Forrester of Hull, an appropriately nautical dedicatee. I hope he appreciated it. You will note that each drawing is labelled with the name of the ship rather the captain portrayed, lending it a rather bizarre effect in many cases.

Universal Apollo

“Universal Apollo”





Oriental Giant

“Oriental Giant”





Universal Daphne

“Universal Daphne”





Duke Victory

“Duke Victory”





Warren Stein

“Warren Stein”





Sandra

“Sandra”

 

Leave a comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Comments