Making a Fireplace

A Colonial fireplace could blister your toes while chilling your back—and send nine-tenths of its heat up the chimney. Henry H. Saylor begins by asking what a hearth is for if it cannot warm the room.

Writing in the age of the modern home, Saylor takes readers from the firebox to the flue to show why a fireplace is a matter of design, not luck. Too large an opening or a badly built throat can turn a cheerful blaze into wasted heat, a room full of smoke, or a chimney that pulls cold air past everyone by the fire. Even a reversed iron throat can mean tearing down the chimney breast to put things right. What must a fireplace get exactly right to send warmth into the room instead of up the chimney?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.