NavList:

Tom Sult, you wrote:
"Clearly if you are going to have just one book, Bowditch is the one."

Naah... I liked your earlier suggestion better! 

First of all, you guys are missing an important loophole in this "what if". Jackson did not ask what book you would want if you were living in 1970. It's the year 2015. You don't need any sight reduction tables or any logarithm tables. Instead you have a solar-powered scientific calculator that does all of that math. I won't go as far as saying that you also have your smartphone loaded with 500 pdf's of every navigation title in history since that would really be stretching the rules of the game. We still have to pick an actual book --a paper-based information storage device. Just one book.

For reading, a modern Bowditch just won't do... Won't do at all. It's a mediocre encyclopedia, and its appeal is almost entirely constrained to the American navigation community, with a little "leakage" to other English-speaking countries. Surely that tells you something! I like Brad's idea of choosing a nineteenth century Bowditch. There's plenty to learn in there, and much of it is at least entertaining if not always navigationally useful. There are chapters and chapters of useless trivia, like the numerous theorems from Euclidean geometry that have no use in practical navigation at all, and the appendix on eclipses which is similarly useless to a navigator (but which would be an interesting challenge to puzzle over if no other book is available).

As for almanac data, I can survive for twelve years with about four pages of paper covering the Sun and the twenty brightest stars. Those few pages don't count as a book. I could tuck those sheets of paper in the back of my book of choice, and the game referee would be none the wiser. Of course that limited ephemeris data would exclude planet and moon sights, so I would lose some entertainment value (including lunars!), but no serious loss to navigation.

A few other possibilities:

• Any edition of Mixter's Primer of Navigation from the 1940s.
• Lecky's Wrinkles in Practical Navigation preferably one of the late 19th century editions.
• For a modern choice, maybe David Burch's Emergency Navigation --lots of fun in there.
• Another recent choice: John Letcher's Self-Contained Celestial Navigation with HO 208, brilliant on every level.

If you're trying to imagine this scenario sans book-bashing wife, try this on for size:
your boat is sinking, slowly but surely, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. You have saved your "ditch kit" of navigation items (including that solar-powered scientific calculator and those pages of almanac data). You're looking at your library of a hundred navigation books, some historical and some recent, which will all be doomed to Davy Jones locker in fifteen minutes. Which one will you save? Is it Bowditch??

Frank Reed
ReedNavigation.com / HistoricalAtlas.com
Conanicut Island USA