FORMER NEWS:

  I would call him the Grand Old Man of Celestial Navigation, only he isn't old; but he certainly is grand! The inimitable David Burch, whom you know from these pages as the head of the Starpath school that taught me celestial navigation, and as the author of Emergency Navigation, has added a new hat as the Editor of the Newsletter of the Navigation Foundation (The Foundation for the Promotion of the Art of Navigation).  Everyone who reads these pages and loves celestial navigation would love the newsletters. They are a wonderful trove of information, both practical and arcane, navigation history, book reviews, stories, letters, etc. I have a huge stack of them I am still going through, and I have bought a lot of back issues, but I don't have them all, so you can imagine my delight when I got an email from David that said - among other things - 

The first thing we did as new editor, was to make an electronic archive of all back issues of the Foundation newsletter, since 1983. You can see this at www.starpath.com/navigationfoundation. It is fully searchable and I was very impressed with the content in there... Now it is a simple matter of using the Elibra Reader's search engine to find whatever you want.  A tremendous resource for anyone interested in cel nav. We use our own Elibra ebook system, which is described at www.elibrabooks.com, and in the catalog of that section you will also see what we call the Mariner's Antique Library, where we are slowly preserving old books on navigation.

Now, you know I am the least bossy webmistress you could possibly have, but I have decided to pull my bossy card just this once, and tell everyone to join the Foundation, and also follow David's link above to the Newsletter site, where you can buy the searchable archive, either as a CD or in downloadable form.