The second edition of the very useful Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, edited by I.C.B. Dear and Peter Kemp, contains more than 2,6 entries on a wide range of arcana (oceanic, naval and mythical), some fine drawings of the bowline, the clove hitch and the reef knot, and a good sketch of the GMDSS global search and rescue system, but no mention of the legendary RMS Nascopie, the ragtag icebreaker that sank a German submarine in World War I, supplied Hudson’s Bay Company posts in the eastern Arctic for many decades and, in 1937, achieved the first exchange of goods through the fabled Northwest Passage. Neither does the Companion mention the Karluk, the storied schooner (whose skipper, Bob Bartlett of Newfoundland, was perhaps the greatest Arctic navigator of all time) abandoned with its crew by the slippery Vilhjalmur Steffanson, an Arctic hero who was, like Franklin, responsible for the deaths of large numbers of officers and crew. Martin Frobisher is included in the pages of the Companion, but not the magician John Dee, who fashioned Frobisher’s navigational instruments and showed him how to use them: Dee, who invested in Humphrey Gilbert’s fatal voyage, was for a few weeks in 1583 the putative landlord of all of North America above the 54th parallel. Despite these deficiencies, this book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in nauticality, and at the same time a gross affront to lovers of typography: the heavy bold font (Gill Sans) used for headwords in the entries and in the index, along with little arrows (dear God!) in place of punctuation, make this book almost impossible to read for more than a few minutes at a time: a sad example of typography debauched by designers of websites.