Wood and Forest

In a Kyoto grove, bamboo can shoot up to seventy feet in a single season—and, William Noyes reports, it is twice as strong as any of our woods. What can a tree’s hidden structure tell us about the material in a woodworker’s hands?

Written in the early twentieth century as a companion to Handwork in Wood, Noyes’s guide begins not at the workbench but with the living tree. He follows wood from its place among flowering plants to the layers beneath a trunk’s bark, showing why the grain, growth and inner tissues matter when timber is put to use. Along the way, familiar labels prove unreliable: some broad-leaved woods are soft, while some conifers are hard. To understand what a board can do, must we first learn to see the tree it came from?

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.