Stage Harbor Yacht Club

“‘There are no rocking chairs in our Yacht Club and I hope there’ll never be any.’ Fritz Hovey had an idea—let’s start a yacht club in Stage Harbor. The year was 1932, and the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. The club envisioned by Fritz Hovey was not the formal variety seen on Boston’s North Shore or on Long Island Sound, with large clubhouses and verandas overlooking the sea. Instead, the club he had in mind would be informal, with sailing and racing at its core.”

Coffee table books have been ubiquitous, ornamenting our living rooms and acting as collapsible museums of the images and events that excite us. A book like this is often seen as the ultimate keepsake of an institution or society. Presenting and preserving cherished memories, they are often given free license in their production and design. The Stage Harbor Yacht Club in Chatham, Massachusetts chose just such a book to celebrate its 75th anniversary. I love a design job like this and have done a fair number. Something about diving into the decades-old archives of a venerable American institution piques the curiosity of the historian in me. I enjoy getting to know the folks in the old photographs through their letters and memorabilia. It is a wonderful opportunity to exercise the full possibilities of book design and this book was a fair example with everything from a translucent fly leaf to a red ribbon page marker. And something tells me that even if it does receive a few stains from cocktail glasses along the way, it is going to remain a valuable piece of the history of this organization, informing the next generation about where they came from. I chose Adobe Chaparral designed by Carol Twombley for its up-to-date feeling and its very complete set of glyphs, providing large and small caps as well as old-style figures and a good variety of weights. For an accent, I used ITC Kabel for pull quotes.