For the past 35 years Colin Milner has been recording history, not with words, but with pen and ink.
Born with a talent for drawing, and self-taught in the use of ink and paint, Mr Milner has been recording Napier's colourful landscape of buildings.
He was born in Birmingham in the UK and spent many of his younger years at sea with the merchant navy, before discovering New Zealand, and Napier in 1960.
"I loved the place and still do, and decided to stay," he said.
As well as his wife, he brought his love of drawing and putting down in pictures everything that caught his eye.
And that is quite a lot.
He has drawn thousands of images, mainly of buildings and of his second love, the great ships which sailed, and continue to sail, the oceans.
"It was something I was born with," he said.
"I liked art at school but I've had no training. It is just a gift I got to draw things. It just comes to me."
A couple of years ago he decided to create a history book of the city he now calls home, so set to work casting through the huge archive of pictures he had created to create such a volume.
From his many folders of work he has settled on 160 images, each set out in sections which cover the very earliest pioneering days of Napier, pre-earthquake buildings and houses, and post-earthquake. "Many of these buildings are no longer with us," he said pointing to a couple of old cottages which were once close to the centre of the city but came down in the early 1960s. "But I drew them."
The results will be titled Historic Napier 1850-2012 and as well as a colourfully eclectic parade of images he has put together equally colourful descriptions.
Like that for an old dairy on Hastings St. During the war the owner built a bomb shelter in his backyard and would dutifully walk to the nearby seafront and, using binoculars, would scan the horizon for ships.
Locals, amused by his antics, dubbed him "the Singapore spy."
For many pictures in the earthquake section he visited rest homes to speak with people who went through the event and picked up a string of stories.
"Everyone has been so helpful to me," he said.
Of the many paintings and watercoloured drawings in the collection is one of the Royal yacht Britannia when it arrived, carrying the Queen, at the Port of Napier in 1963. Seafaring was a major part of 74-year-old Mr Milner's life, although after arriving in Napier and stepping ashore for the last time he took up teaching, enrolling at Teachers Training College, and while the working days were teaching children much of his spare time was devoted to capturing the changing city around him.
He has hundreds of inked and painted images of Napier's changing landscape of buildings since the'60s, as well as hundreds of pictures he drew from what he discovered in books and archives of early Napier.
Mr Milner said the book was in its final preparation stages and likely to be released in March.
"It will be different from a regular history book. It will be more a coffee table book of pictures which will get people talking - of buildings they remember or never knew were there."