Happy New Year!
Two new books are on the way for 2020. They’re very different, but both amazing!
First up is Henry Eugene Vandervell’s account of his experiments with different blade designs in The Figure Skate. Vandervell was very important in the development of figure skating, and his results live on in modern figure skate blades, which have the amount of curvature he recommended way back in 1901. This book will appeal strongly to technically inclined readers, but even those who are not will find the previously untold story of Vandervell’s family life in the introduction fascinating.
Next is a collection of short fiction and semi-fiction by well-known author Edward Frederic Benson. He’s known to fans of Lowther as the author of the other book on English skating, English Figure Skating (1908), and to non-skaters as the author of the Mapp and Lucia series. These stories, set in England and Switzerland, paint a colorful picture of what it was like to be a skater at the turn of the last century.
Watch for these books in the coming months!