Purchased a book on Ebay, then found a free copy online

[Jason Buresh]

I found a book called Elementary Woodworking online and it looked like an interesting view into the past. I ordered the hard copy, from the early 1900's and then discovered Harvard Library actually has a digital copy available online. If anyone is interested, there is a link below.

https://books.google.com/books?id=dJ...other_versions

If you hit preview this book you can see the pages. There is some interesting information on tools, lumber, and techniques. Whike most of the information is basic, it is still neat to read about hiw things were done in days gone by.

[Andrew Pitonyak]

A completely different book!

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?...view=2up&seq=2

Oil Stones
How To Select and Use Them

A very interesting read for me anyway. And yes, they have more books as well.

[Winston Chang]

Thanks for the link to the book!

One thing that struck me was that half of the book is dedicated describing different kinds of trees found in the United States. The pictures in that section of the book are mostly of leaves and of living trees, rather than of lumber. The fact that a book titled Elementary Woodworking tells how to distinguish sugar maple leaves from Norway maple leaves suggests that woodworkers back then had a very different relationship with the source of their lumber.

It's also interesting to read the author's perspectives on various kinds of trees. For example: "The king among evergreens is usually admitted to be the white pine. Its soft, bluish-green foliage, the widespreading branches, and the value of its fine, even-grained wood give it the first rank... the wood is so free from pitch and is so easily worked with tools that these great forests have been almost annihilated by the lumberman's ax, and white-pine timber has become quite expensive. It takes many years for a tree to grow large enough for timber, and unless we are more economical in the future white pine will be only a memory."

I wonder if, when this book was written, lumber mostly came from virgin forest, before trees like this were commonly grown on plantations.

[Jason Buresh]

Winston,

I missed that part. Thanks for sharing. Funny how pine is described as expensive in the book and today is cheap, common lumber.

I too was surprised at the amount of the book dedicated strictly to tree identification. I find this information very useful and interesting and will be bringing this book to my parents property next summer. There are lots of popple and some oaks i have been caring for, but i would like to plant some more hardwoods. I may not get lumber in my lifetime but maybe my future children will