[fenomas]

What I love about ABOK is that, while it's exhaustive and technical, there's still a lot of personality in the descriptions and commentary. Not only in the chapter headings, but even the knot descriptions sometimes have random little anecdotes, and you get the sense that the author must have been quite a guy.

A favorite quote:

> The topsail halyard bend is said to be a yachting hitch, but it is possible that it has never appeared outside the covers of a book. It has one more turn than the studding-sail bend and this, like the second tablespoonful of castor oil, savors of redundancy.