The Woodbook

Despite the incredibly annoying use of dark gold lettering on black pages, making it difficult to read, this reprint of the famous 1928 work, with all new color plates, is simply phenomenal. It has the standard 3 views (transverse / cross section, radial / quartersawn, and tangential / flat cut) of each of many hundreds of native american woods. The photography is outstanding and the selection of specific wood samples is VERY well done to produce nicely representative pieces of each species. The photographs are taken from neither too far away nor too close to the wood so that the results are very useful for wood identification.

Botanical names are given along with several common names and a brief discussion of each wood is given in English, German, and French. The images are not little thumbnail images, but useful sizes, taking up 1/3rd of a page, thus using a full page per species just for the images. There is an index that allows you to look up a wood by botanical or common name.

This is one of the most (if not THE most) expensive wood reference works currently in print but it is well worth the price for woodworkers with an interest in detailed images of domestic woods. It does not have pictures of trees, just the lumber itself.

North Carolina State University maintains an extensive web site on woods and buried somewhere in it is a full set of the ORIGINAL images from the 1928 version of this book, so you CAN get a similar set of images on-line instead of buying the book, but I still recommend the book.