UNRAVELING THE MYSTERIES OF KNOTS

12 KNOTS YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT

- Ryan Lee Price

Clifford W. Ashley was an artist, author and sailor and was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1881.

Because of his boyhood environment, he took a keen interest in whaling and all things related to the sea. After attending art school in Boston, he found himself under the tutelage of Howard Pyle in Delaware, where he created book frontispieces (illustrations facing the cover page of the book) and illustrated magazine stories. He spent six weeks aboard a whaling ship in order to do research for an article about whaling for Harper’s Monthly magazine in 1904 and later published a series of instructional articles (“The Sailor and His Knots”), which proved to be the prelude to his later opus, The Ashley Book of Knots, a magnificent tome that made him famous in 1944.

In it, Ashley warns: “A knot is either exactly right or it is hopelessly wrong. Make only one change and either an entirely different knot is made or no knot at all may result.”

The book contains more than 3,900 knots categorized by type, including knot usage and the instructions for tying them. Nearly 75 years later, it remains the most comprehensive book in print about knots.

Types of Knots

Although the art of tying both functional and fashionable knots has been around since man first needed to lash down his hut or tie off a fishing net to his hollowed-out canoe, knots have been both utilitarian and beautiful—an expression of both personal artwork and pride in workmanship. There are thousands of them; however, generally speaking, knots are used for five main reasons:

• Splicing two ropes together

• Lashing one object to another