Knotmare

THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS -- Clifford W. Ashley--Doubleday, Doran ($7.50).

To Clifford W. Ashley, "the simple act of tying a knot is an adventure in unlimited space." He never saw Houdini or a successful lynching. But he once halted an operation in Boston to see how the surgeon made his stitches fast.

Ashley solved his first knotty problem in 1884, at the age of three, when an uncle taught him to tie a reef (square) knot. Since then he has hobnobbed with sailors, cowboys, circus men, weavers, tailors, butchers, truck drivers, Boy Scouts, steeple jacks, cobblers, electric linemen, "and with elderly ladies who knit." He has watched oxen slung for shoeing, accompanied tree surgeons aloft, shadowed poachers to examine their snares.

Ashley's Book of Knots is a monument to 40 knotty years and a magnificent nose-thumb at the paper shortage. Ashley spent eleven years writing and illustrating its 620 pages. He tells the names, sources, histories and uses of 3,900 knots, supplies some 7,000 drawings to help explain how to tie them.

Taken tangle by tangle, Knots is instructive and often amusing. From Archer to Yachtsman, it describes the knots of nearly 100 occupations, including the baker's pretzel twist and the parachutist's sling. It gives explicit instructions on how to spit and truss a fowl, lace a football, mend a garden hose, string pearls, fly a kite, string a fiddle, tie a necktie. It offers such engaging oddments as the Norfolk-to-Washington Boat Heaving Line Knot, Department-Store Loop, Cuckold's Neck Knot, Bathrobe Cord Knot.

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