Like Wordsworth, the Romantic poet who took refuge in the memory of daffodils dancing in the wind when city life proved to be too tedious, canoeists try to store up enough adventure during the summer to last them through the winter. Don Standfield and Liz Lundell may be banking on the fact that readers will be suffering from paddling withdrawal right about now.

Standfield and Lundell have put together a coffee table book that is an attractive scrapbook of anecdotes and discrete musings culled from 400 years of canoe tripping. Loosely organized into chapters that follow the same stages as a canoe trip, the anecdotes record everything from equipment lists to returning to civilization after a paddle. Interspersed throughout are photographs, some of them telling, but many no better than what you might find in the average canoe tripper’s album. Too many of the captions read like inside jokes.

Despite the collection’s subtitle, the book is rather thin on wisdom, unless you count Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s “child of nature” discourse, which, although a nice piece of writing, is perhaps too hackneyed for any well-read canoe tripper. Well-known canoeist Bill Mason’s only contribution is a short but humorous piece on high-grade gorp eaters, while Standfield gets more than a few opportunities to wax poetic about storms or joke about sexy neck muscles with his peers.

The book’s strongest features are the excerpts and photographs that document an earlier era when the conditions were harsher and equipment was less sophisticated. A surprising number of these early writings come from women who must have been truly exceptional individuals to paddle against the currents of convention and portage in skirts.

The past four centuries have given us a wealth of Canadian canoe tripping records. It’s a shame that Stories from the Bow Seat didn’t use more of them.