Ralph Preston is an armchair shrink’s delight. When he was barely old enough to walk, he loved to curl up under cardboard boxes. As a kid, he dug tunnels for himself in the backyard. As he explains it, “I was enchanted by enclosed spaces.”

He still is. Now 69, the Hinesburg resident is one of those mysteriously motivated creative souls who finds solace in that most anal of artistic pursuits: building ships in bottles. Yes, people really do still do that. Not many people — about 400 in the United States — but they’re out there, snipping tiny sail lines with cuticle scissors, crafting pin-sized masts. What drives them? The lure of the sea? A return-to-the-womb fixation?

“It’s a different world in the bottle,” Preston says. “I think I’m putting myself in the bottle. It’s comfortable in there.”

A retired math professor from St. Michael’s, Preston is Vermont’s sultan of small-scale. Mini whalers, clippers, schooners, galleons — complete with historically-accurate colors and thumbnail-sized crew members in period dress — have been Preston’s painstaking pride for over half a century. As far as he knows, he’s the only bottleship builder left in the state. Internationally known for his lectures on the craft, and for over 200 models in private homes and museums around the world — his closest commission was from the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut — Preston can imagine nothing more pleasant than a good four-hour stretch at his work bench.

With a homemade fivepower magnifier strapped to his forehead, high-intensity lamps shining and enough bass wood “to last me 50 years” at the ready, Preston spends five days a week in one of the two shops in his home. One shop is exclusively for power tooling — to restrict sawdust — the other is for hand work, where 90 percent of his cutting and carving is done. If pressed, he’ll admit he built both shops. Oh, and he also built his house: two A-frames joined in a cruciform. “It’s a wild piece of architecture,” Preston explains. “It doesn’t fit any category.”

Preston takes pride in eluding categorization — even in his shipbuilding approach. It’s hard to imagine anything more disciplined than building a ship at one-hundredth the original size, precisely cutting it apart, then reassembling it piece-by-piece with long-handled tweezers inside a 19-gallon spherical laboratory flask. But to listen to Preston describe it, this procedure sounds less like a painstaking operation than an act of rebellion.

“I have my own beliefs,” he says. “Traditionalists build the ship outside the bottle, fold it like an umbrella, insert it in the bottle and unfold it. In art, you go setting rules and you’re on very thin ice. You fence yourself in.”

His love of restrictive spaces aside, Preston has never let himself be fenced in. He came “yay close” to a Navy court martial in World War II for telling off a commanding officer. His first job, as a product developer for a major electronics company, ended when “I was ordered to commit fraud and told ’em to go to hell.” Old bosses and commanders are now immortalized — in bottles. They served as models for some of Preston’s tiny sailors, eternally keeping his ships afloat.

Born in the land-locked Northeast Kingdom, Preston grew up building model airplanes and reading about the sea. At 13, he tried his hand at a bottleship — the Normandy. It was a crude attempt, but he was hooked. By high school, he was ordering model plans by mail. Before long, he was doing his own research and finding mistakes in museum-published plans.

Preston’s mechanic father approved of his son’s hobby. Young Ralph was even allowed to use his dad’s shop to make the model-building tools he still uses. But there was another hobby his father and schoolteacher mother didn’t know about. He was sneaking out of the house to take ballet lessons. After three years of secrecy, the jig was up.

“My father was sure I was gay,” says Preston, who decided against a dance career because he was convinced he’d be a heterosexual outcast in the field.

He never shook the dance bug, though. Most weekend nights, he drives into Burlington and boogies “with younger women” at Sh-Na-Na’s.

Of the six ships he’s currently working on, Preston is most attached to his model of the Amistad, an 1839 Spanish slave ship famous for being successfully overthrown by its captives. It should take about five years to complete — a year shy of his average project length. Like all his constructions, this one will be given to friends or sold. Prices start at $2500 for his smallest ships. He is unwilling to talk price on larger models — his specialty is a 20-incher — but does say he’s negotiating with a European museum willing to pay “record price” for a recently completed whaler.

It’s obvious bottleship builders aren’t in it for the money. It’s a labor of love — luckily, considering what one wrong move can mean. For Preston, that move happened five years ago. A few weeks before completing a model, he broke a mast. “I said, gosh darn,’ Preston says, adding, “I hope you don’t believe that for a second.” Removing, repairing and replacing the busted piece took 11 months.

All the sweat and eye strain is worth it for Preston. But he’s “a little worried” that future generations of artisans won’t share his enthusiasm. So he speaks to school groups and is working to establish the first American bottleship museum to draw continuing interest in the craft. But his ultimate contribution to the tradition is his ships, and he knows it. As Ralph Preston puts it, “I want them to be around after I’ve gone to the great bottle in the sky.”

This article appears in December 6 • 1995.