The Woodbook: The Complete Plates
Product Description
TASCHEN’s 25th anniversary - Special edition! Revised edition at a new low price Culled and assembled by Romeyn Beck Hough between 1888 and 1913 in what still remains a stunning and unparalleled achievement, American Woods ?originally published in 14 volumes, with actual specimens mounted on card stock?is a work of breathtaking beauty that has set the standard for the study of trees and wood. TASCHEN’s Wood Book reproduces, in painstaking facsimile, all of the specimen pages from the original volumes; for this purpose we have obtained the use of an extremely rare original set of volumes in very good condition, with minimal damage to the wood cuts. For all trees, now arranged in alphabetical order, three different cross-section cuts of wood are represented (radial, horizontal, and vertical), demonstrating the particular characteristics of the grain and the wealth of colors and textures to be found among the many different wood types. Also included in this special edition are lithographs by Charles Sprague Sargent of the leaves and nuts of most trees, as well as texts describing the trees? geographical origins and physical characteristics. Interior designers, craftsmen, nature enthusiasts, and artists alike will enjoy this beautiful collection of wood samples which includes many trees that are now very rare or completely extinct.
Customer Reviews
Beautiful book, great photos, limited info4
This is a beautiful book — almost coffee table quality. It opens with an interesting history of American forests and their trees, albeit from a "we destroyed the beautiful forests and the environmentalists saved them" perspective. The pages associated with each tree variety contains a very limited bit of information about the variety and three nice photos of the grain, one in each orientation — longitudinal, transverse, and radial.
While the three grain perspective photos are useful, I had hoped for something with more that just a couple of lines of information about each species — more like Hoadley’s two excellent books, the USDA "Wood Handbook" or Peters’ "Woodworker’s Guide to Wood".
Each opening chapter and each information page is printed in three
