he travels—though you’d never recognize
any of it if you stepped into the tiny attic
workspace of his snug Adirondack-style cabin
in northeastern Pennsylvania.
That’s because Eckstein has completely
transformed his Mac setup and home office
in the style of a 19th-century whaling vessel,
hiding his modern computer gear—iMac,
scanners, printers and graphics tablet—behind
custom-fitted vintage boxes and pieces of
old wood that he found at auctions and flea
markets.
“This whole thing began eight years ago,
when I started work on the fictional diary of
a man looking for the lost ship of Sir John
Franklin,” Eckstein says. “In 1850, Franklin was
looking for the passage to China and he got
lost. England put up an amazing reward—an
enormous amount of money—for anyone
who could find evidence of Franklin’s ship.
So all these people started making a mad
scramble for this fortune without realizing
what it was like to go up by the North Pole. At
that time people thought that the closer you
got to the North Pole, the closer you’d get to
paradise and that
temperatures would
get more temperate.
All these facts lend
themselves to a
comedy about Arctic
exploration. So I
started writing this
diary.”
Eckstein would
like to publish the
fictional diary
(working title:
The Sea Below
Us) someday,
but the Arctic
enthusiast wrote
his most recent book,
The History of the Snowman (2007, Simon
Spotlight), during the same period, drawing
inspiration from his seaworthy surroundings.
Ever since he was a kid, Eckstein says, he
has nurtured an abiding interest in Arctic
history and exploration, which extended to the
ships and other craft used by early explorers to
You’d never guess Eckstein’s neat cabin conceals his boyhood
dream come true in the attic.
Instead of a
peephole, Eckstein
installed a ship’s
porthole in his office
door.
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