HOBBITHOUSE REVIEWS OF BOOKS ON WOOD AND WOODWORKING
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TITLE: Wood! Identifying and Using Hundreds of Woods of the World
AUTHOR: Eric Meier
PUBLISHER / YEAR: / # PAGES Eric self-published, 2015, 250+pp
ISBN: ISBN-10: 978-0-9822460--3-0
PRICE: $35.00
Eric Meier, who owns/runs The Wood Database web site has now published a really good wood book, called "Wood! Identifying and Using Hundreds of Woods Worldwide". It is basically a hard-copy of his web site.
It's better than most of the other reference books I have. The introductory chapters about wood structure, etc, are REALLY good. He's clearly put a lot of time, research, and thought into this and it shows. No book with just introductory chapters on wood characteristics will ever rival Hoadley's “Understanding Wood”, but Eric's is the best such set of introductory chapters that I've ever seen.
Another bit of good news is that he covers a lot of woods. I haven't counted them but the "Hundreds" in the title is not an exaggeration. Like all books, a serious drawback in its being helpful for wood ID is that it has only one picture of each wood. Since most woods don't have a "representative" look that would help ID every piece of that wood, having just a single picture is a significant drawback.
Eric chose to use full size images so they are of necessity of a very modest sized area (about 4" square) of each sample. The good news about this is that it shows the graininess of the face quite well. The bad news is that it's too close up to give a good feel for what the a plank of the wood actually looks like. Eric has also included a picture for most of the more common woods of an object made using the wood, which helps.
His selection of pieces of each wood to photograph is exceptionally good compared to many such books and his photography is excellent. The color plates are good but do suffer severely from the problem of darkening. I corresponded w/ Eric about this and he is frustrated by it. His original images were quite good (see his web site) and in the proof copy he approved they looked good on the page, but when they were printed on glossy paper, there was a lot of severe darkening. The affect of this on the accuracy of the wood color varies and it's a problem in most such books, not just his.
A further advantage of this book is that Eric has images of, and discussions of, the end grain closeups that can be so important in doing wood identification. Sadly, the darkening of the images is the worst on some of these, leading to a severe loss of contrast/detail, to the point of making them not very useful. The end grain images on his site are much better.
Like most such references that have end grain pictures (of the few that HAVE them) it suffers from the fact that it's not much help in identifying a wood unless you already have a pretty good guess about what the wood of interest is, or at least can narrow it down to a small number of possibilities. That is, if you were looking at the end grain characteristics of a piece of mystery wood that you were trying to ID, you would have to look through all of the hundreds of images in the book until you found on that was similar and then look at all the rest anyway just to be sure there isn't one that is more similar. Much more useful is Hoadley's "Identifying Wood" which has an organization of the characteristics that can save you some of that work. Even more useful is the web site http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/_anatomy/_anatomy.htm has an organizational structure that will help you narrow your search (and it has 3,000+ end grain 12X images with multiple images on most woods which is often more useful than single images). That web site also tells you exactly the size of the images you are looking at, something that neither Hoadley's nor Eric's books do.
At any rate, I consider Eric's book to be a great addition to my bookshelf. He said it took him 6 years to get it done and I believe it. It was time well spent. There's more good stuff I could go on about, but buy one and you'll see what I mean. It's definitely worth the price. If you would like a more extensive view of the contents beyond the opening chapters, most of them are essentially just his website converted to printed form although many are condensed compared to the web site, which is here: The Wood Database