The Woodbook

Rating:
Summary: The Woodbook
Review: A facsimile of a rare masterpiece: a 14-volume treasury of American woods that appeared a century ago. The original carried actual veneers; this one volume version has almost as strong a visceral quality and is packaged in its own wood box. Anyone who has hugged a tree will want to browse these pages, reveling in the subtle tones and florid grains of cork elm and swamp maple, prickly ash and black calabash. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)

Rating:
Summary: This is really something
Review: Anybody taking this book to hand will be impressed. The publisher went all out to make this as luxurious an edition as possible, even providing a plywood box to keep the book in. The printing quality is beautiful and the woods are presented in close to (glorious) natural color. For every wood a separate picture is presented, as is proper, of a transverse, a radial and a tangential surface (ie a cross, a quartersawn and a flatsawn surface).

However, lots of quibbles are possible. Firstly the book is misnamed: the title 'The_Woodbook' suggests rather more than is actually covered. It is a reprint (sort of) of 'The_American_Woods' which also was misnamed, presenting only woods grown in the US. It is safe to say that better than 95% of the important woods of the world are not present in 'The_Woodbook'. Secondly it is not an actual reprint. It would be more acurate to say that it is a facsimile reproduction of the woods in one of the copies of 'The_American_Woods' accompanied by modern text. This modern text is an amalgamation of that in 'The_American_Woods' and of that in Sargent's masterpiece. More troublesome in my opinion is the 'artsy' approach with the black background of all the pages (except those which are golden): this blackness is not only on the verge of being depressing, but also is hindering easy reading of the text and outright blocks being able to view the line-drawings of tree morphology on every page (actually I must admit that after browsing through the book several times I only discovered these drawings after having read in the introduction that a drawing was presented on every page. A search then turned them up quickly). The printing quality of these drawings is fairly good but it is very hard to make them out against the background (tilting the book to catch a favorable gleam of light does help). The supporting text is of course quite brief, due to the fact that it must be repeated on the same page in german and french, and still leave room for artistic black (or golden) 'white' space. On the upside, errors in botanical names are actually quite few, at least when disregarding the offences against author names.

All in all, this is a very creditable effort, which will be treasured by many who love wood (and especially so in the US).