Cruise Books

This past summer I had the pleasure of interning at the US Navy Library. I hate to diminish your collections, but the library takes great pride in its collection of literally thousands of cruise books dating back as far as the Spanish-American War.

List of Cruise Books at the Navy Department Library

I often found myself quickly scarfing down lunch so I could spend more of my break time reading them! It was great being able to chat with the guys who came by to reminisce with a cruise book.

I also aught to mention what I spent a considerable portion of my time working on, the ship files. My job was to catalogue all the Commissioning, Welcome Aboard, and Decommissioning pamphlets, along with all sorts of neat little documents dating back as far as the 18th century.

Ship Files

Very neat library, great people, but grossly underfunded. The place is like Heaven on Earth!

I have a few older ones...not quite as many as you do...

USS Savannah 1942-43
USS Vicksburg 1944-45
USS Cushing 1943-45

Hold on to them, they really are treasures...

Jeff

That sounds like a remarkable collection. I hope you'll take good care of them - and, eventually, make arrangements for them to go to a library or other repository when you're gone. People often don't take such things as seriously as they should, and valuable documents like cruise books go into the trash when the original owners pass on. Imagine, for instance, what a treasure trove a big stack of cruise books from the fifties would be.