HOBBITHOUSE REVIEWS OF BOOKS ON WOOD AND WOODWORKING
TITLE: The Encyclopedia of Wood
AUTHOR(s): Aiden Walker (general editor)
PUBLISHER / YEAR: / # PAGES Quarto, 1989 & 2005, 192pp
ISBN: 0-8160-6181-5
PRICE: list $35, street $10 to $45 (I've seen it supposedly new as low as $15)
SUMMARY DESCRIPTION:
This "Full size" book (9"x12") features a full-page entry for each of some 150 popular woods. Each entry provides a good description of the appearance, growth rate, distribution (with maps), working properties (in both narrative and chart form: impact resistance, stiffness, density, workability, bending strength, and crushing strength), and commercial uses of each wood. Each page is 1/3 devoted to a large image of the species and in general the images are quite good, although there is the usual tendancy towards too much orange in the colors of many of them.
Most of the images are good representations of the species, but not all. There is some tendancy for the pics to have been taken a little too close to the wood, which is nice for seeing a lot of detail in the grain, but poor for actually being able to use the pics to identify the wood as it appears in a lumber yard. Sen, for example, has a truly awful representation and that's just one example. American white oak and beech, for example, are both presented with a deep orange color that is unlike anything I've ever seen in the real world, and that's just a couple of the worst examples.
The book starts off with a 25 page introductory section that provides quite a good discussion of trees, their anatomy, the forests they grow in, and also a discussion of lumber including characterisics, processing techniques, and uses. Then there are the 150 pages of descriptions/images. The presentation is ordered alphabetically by botanical name but there is an index that allows you to find species by common name. The compilation was done in England, so names follow the UK standards, not the USA names. "Sycamore" for example, is used in this book in the UK sense of "maple" (Acer pseudoplatanus), not the normal American sycamore tree (Platanus occidentalis), and the American sycamore isn't represented at all, although its
sister species Platanus hybrida (European plane) is (although with an AMAZINGLY overdone orange color)
There are maps showing growth range and I think this is are a really nice touch. Personally, I greatly enjoy having them, although I don't see their utility to the normal woodworker. The graphical representation of wood characteristics such as density and bending strength is really nice. Most of us don't have a good sense of what the NUMBERS for these characteristics mean without some research, so seeing a graphical representation of their value within a range is, I find, very useful.
This is a "precursor" book to Lincoln's World Woods in Color, Many of the images in both books are "identical" except for the fact that the colors are radically different between the two. I have given an example of such a difference along with the review of Lincoln's book and I repeat here a conclusion I came to when doing that review, namely that I think BOTH books have the wrong color more often than they have it right, and even when they use the the same image, the colors are very noticibly different and they obviously can't BOTH be right since they are clearly of the same piece of wood. Generally, the pics in this book are better than those in Lincoln's book.
Overall grade, A- (the text and graphics are a solid A, but the pics range from A to D). Not as extensive in range of species as some of the thicker books, but the size is nice and for mabye $25, this is a lot of good information.