Wow, it's scary to see that others are devoting such time and thought to the building of canoe bookcases. I'm into it for two reasons:

1) To flood my local market with "real" canoe bookcases so idiots will stop cutting restorable Old Towns and Thompsons in half for a quick buck.
2) My wife says I have way too many canoes. And don't build more! But I've got all this cedar...

You've shared some great info, Paul. Let me return the favor.

My section forms stay in the bookcase and do become the shelves, as you suggest, Paul. I clamp the pre-finished shelf/forms in precise position on 12" spacing on the strongback, then remove the clamps when the "hull" comes off.

And like Hazen, I do a football first then strip downward with white cedar strips. My football, however, is a resawed 4" x 1/4" panel of white cedar cut on my bandsaw to a template developed from lines pulled from a previous canoe bookcase stripped from the sheer upwards.

And I've found that edge-glued strip bookcases merely varnished on both sides often get huge and catastrophic stress cracks when placed in a cabin with wildly fluctuating relative hunidities. So I don't glue the strips, but instead attach them with copper canoe tacks to steamed cedar ribs from my metal-clad wood/canvas mold that has identical lines to the cedarstrip mold. So I guess I'm combining wood/canvas and cedarstrip techniques.