First of all, don't blame me for the unimaginitive title. It was the publisher's idea. I wanted to call it
Wings, Water, and Floats.
I was invited to write it by TAB Books in late 1983 after they had seen a bunch of my float flying articles in flying magazines like
Private Pilot. I submitted a proposal and it was accepted. I wrote it in nine months and did all the photos and line drawings and the first edition was published in 1985.
TAB liked to update their books about every five years, so in 1990 I wrote a second edition which had more material in it. The third edition, which included new chapters on flying turbine floatplanes and basic floatplane maintenance came out in 1995 (I think).
TAB was then purchased by McGraw-Hill. They began to up the price of the book until it was something like $35 (the second edition had been priced at $17.95). Considering that it was still being printed on the same mid-quality paper and was still a soft-cover book, this severely overpriced the book and sales, which were never huge as it's quite a niche market, began to drop off. They took it out of print in the early 2000s as I recall. They gave the copyright to me but I've not seen any value in trying to get it printed again.