"I thought I knew what to expect, but it wasn't the elegant sheer of
fifty-six feet of white topside; the tailored teak of the deck with its
brass sparkling; the pale soaring poles of her masts.  Graceful,
orderly, and impeccably workmanlike."
                                                       Dolly and the Nanny Bird, Chapter 12
                                                           (Sphere Books Limited, London, 1978, p. 148)

She's a gaffer-rigged auxiliary ketch....

Dolly is one of the most important characters in the books and one of Dorothy Dunnett's most memorable creations, though she is a setting, not a person.  It is the beloved yacht Dolly that gets Johnson from place to place and is the setting for some magnificent action on high seas - and low seas, too.

Characteristics of the Johnson Johnson series:

• Johnson's exact medical state is never described, and his eyes are never seen.  His clothes are usually rumpled and his hair is black and moppy.
• Each book is narrated by a woman whose profession brings about her role in the story
• The first sentence in each book refers to bifocals, such as are worn by Johnson Johnson.
• As in all Dunnett novels, noting is ever certain!
• There are seven books in the series to date.  Dorothy Dunnett is uncertain whether she will write another one - at last, she isn't committing herself.  She says she is out of touch with sailing lore now.

Dolly and the Singing Bird	Men in bifocal glasses.  I spit.
Dolly and the Cookie Bird	Bifocal glasses are common.
Dolly and the Doctor Bird	I shall call it, with some levity, the bifocals syndrome.
Dolly and the Starry Bird	I have nothing, even yet, against bifocal glasses.
Dolly and the Nanny Bird	Everyone knows three boring facts about Eskimos. I'll tell you another.  Whenever I think about Eskimos, I think about bifocal spectables.
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise	To most of my clients, bifocal glasses are asthma.  All those words are spelled correctly.  I looked them up.
Moroccan Traffic	"Bifocal spectacles!"  shouted my mother, coughing beavily over her daisy-wheel printer.  "Now my daughter wastes her time on some self-employed painted with no index-linked company pension?"

We first meet him in Dolly and the Singing Bird, seen through the eyes of Tina Rossi:
 

Of the third [man] I had a first impression only of a pair of bifocal glasses, their half moons bright in the light, and a smile of boundless vacuity.
                                            Dolly and the Singing Bird, Chapter 1
                                                Penguin Books, Hammondsorth, Middlesex, England, 1988,  p. 11.

He was difficult to place.  Not, my God, a man about town, with that green knitted pullover and those socks and his pipe sticking out of one pocket.  But a man who went to a really good barber about three weeks less often than he should, and who could afford a rented flat in the Square, and the kind of cash and camera and cuff links a thief thought worth having.... He was older than I was, but not old.  The agile eyebrows were black, and the shining puff of Indian-black hair showed no grey as yet.  He might as well have had no eyes or mouth, so dominating were the spectacles.  "Thirty-eight," he remarked.
                                                Ibid., Chapter  2, p. 15-16.