New Page 1

Legendary Pirate Books

Coffee Table Style with 300 full-color illustrations
256 Pages 28.50

This worldwide overview of piracy discusses incidents from the earliest days of sea travel to modern times. Julius Caesar was among a group held for ransom by pirates in 78 B.C., and in the Philippines from 1983 to 1994, attacks by pirates armed with automatic rifles averaged nine per month. Accompanying the text are photographs of weapons used, maps of major harbors, and paintings of famous pirates and their ships. Large-scale, detailed drawings of pirate ships include Captain Kidd's vessel from 1695. Although young men generally sought fortune and fame as pirates, a few women also made this choice. Two of the most notorious were Mary Read and Anne Bonny, captured together in 1720 off the coast of Jamaica. They were jailed but not hung (common punishment for Western pirates), because both proved to be pregnant. This book's 11 chapters by notable maritime historians contain 300 full-color illustrations and a lengthy bibliography, all of which supplement the six-part TBS documentary, Pirate Tales, to be broadcast in February. Jennifer Henderson

____________________________________________________________________________

The Pirate Dictionary
$22.50

This dictionary is written to be entertaining as well as informative, to give a flavor of these interesting times from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, when pirates controlled many sea lanes. It also contains a treasure trove of factual information about the life aboard ship, important pirate haunts, and technical terms.

"The Pirate Dictionary is an entertaining and well-written book offering, in alphabetical order, definitions of the words and phrases we have come to know and associate with pirates. The entries launch with "Aback" and drop anchor with "Zee-Rover" (which is Dutch for "pirates," and in English is "sea-rovers"). Many of the entries are words everyone knows, but author Terry Breverton ("Black Bart Roberts: The Greatest Pirate of Them All") has managed to include enough information about them to make each entry worth reading. More illustrations would have been useful and helpful. A handy, valuable historical reference written for the general public. Recommended."

—Advance Book Reviews

_____________________________________________________________________________

Eyewitness Books: Pirates

Richard Platt

Eyewitness Books Pirate
$17.50

Pirate is an amazingly well illustrated book which the Los Angeles Times Book Review described as being "like a mini-museum." This coffee-table-style book primarily consists of an amazing array of over 400 pictures of pirates and pirate-related artifacts. There are some paintings and illustrations, but it's definitely the photographs that dominate this book and just about every one is in full color. Here you'll find pictures of coins, jewels, flintlocks, cutlasses, a treasure chest, a pirate's ring complete with skull and crossbones, the cloak of a "17th-century gentleman pirate", maps, cannons, drums, grenades, a cat-'o-nine-tails, hard tack (a type of cracker they ate), 17th-century glass rum bottles, an earthenware beer bottle, playing cards, wooden dice, pirate flags, a ransom note, a gibbet for hanging the body of an executed pirate in chains, and much, much more. The text is minimal, being used primarily to describe the pictures, but this book should be a welcome addition to any pirate library.

Here's the table of contents:
Robbers of the seas
Pirates of ancient Greece
Pirates of the Roman World
Raiders of the North
The Barbary Coast
The corsairs of Malta
The privateers
The Spanish Main
New World privateers
Navigation and maps
The buccaneers
Weapons
Pirates of the Caribbean
Women pirates
The Jolly Roger
Pirate treasure
Piracy and slavery
Life at sea
Food on board
Life on land
Pirates of the Indian Ocean
Desert islands
The French corsairs
American privateers
Pirates of the China Sea
Punishment
The pirates defeated
Pirates in literature
Pirates in film and theater
Index

Hardcover (8 3/4" x 11 1/4"), over 400 pictures (almost all in full color), 64 pages