The Encyclopedia of Wood: A Tree-By-Tree Guide to the World's Most Valuable Resource [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Bill Lincoln (Author), Lucinda Leech Bill Lincoln (Author), Lucinda Leech (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1989

The most detailed and comprehensive reference of its kind, The Encyclopedia of Wood is the first source book to reflect the full significance of wood as our most versatile and enduring natural resource. More than 400 illustrations. Full color.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Anyone who likes to tramp through the woods, reads the Arbor Day Foundation newsletter, or shops at home-and-garden centers can probably identify a fair number of common trees: maples, oaks, pines, and the like. Some folks can even tell a red maple from a sugar maple, a black oak from a pin oak, and a southern yellow pine from a Norway pine. However, there's a tremendous difference between identifying a living tree and identifying a piece of wood. Living trees offer lots of helpful hints: bark color, bark texture, foliage, seedpods, height, and overall shape. Seasoned, board-cut pieces of wood offer none of these hints, and that's why this specialized identification guide is so useful.

Thirty pages of introductory material, richly enhanced with outstanding maps, photos, and illustrations, explain tree anatomy, tree growth, wood grain, logging practices, conservation, and the various processes for seasoning and preservation of wood. This material is well written and beautifully presented. The real treasure, however, is the "Directory of Wood" section, which contains entries on 150 "top commercial timbers" arranged alphabetically by scientific name. Each one-page entry begins with a four-by-eight-inch photographic reproduction of the specific type of wood. The quality of the color photographs is so high that readers will be tempted to run their fingers over them to feel the wood's texture. Along with these photos are brief descriptions of growth patterns, appearance (the wood, not the living tree), properties, and uses. Closing out each entry are a small world map showing growth location and a small chart indicating structural features, such as impact resistance, bending strength, and crushing strength.

The Encyclopedia of Wood is a beautifully crafted identification guide for practicing woodworkers and others whose professions depend on wood. Libraries whose constituencies include such individuals should give it serious consideration for purchase. Art A. Lichtenstein
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Checkmark Books; illustrated edition edition (September 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816021597
• ISBN-13: 978-0816021598
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 10.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,490,638 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

96 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Succesfull coffee table-book, failed encyclopedia, October 19, 2000

By 

P. van Rijckevorsel (The Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Encyclopedia of Wood: A Tree-By-Tree Guide to the World's Most Valuable Resource (Hardcover)

The strength of the book is the fine quality of the printing, the good color photographs and the enthousiasm of its makers, who obviously love crafting things of wood. This certainly is an attractive coffee table-book which may well inspire those who browse through it into making better use of wood than before.

As an enyclopedia it certainly does not make the grade. Obviously nobody with a botanical background was involved here. On page 20 is a remark about 'apetalous' trees that if ever I decide to award a price for the most-nonsensical-botanical-statement-ever will be a strong contender. The writers failed to pursue a consistent way of writing botanical names. Glancing through the book I note various errors in the history of the use of wood.

In addition the wood pictures, although of the same general size that is cute in "Identifying_Wood" by Aidan Walker (see there), a book derived from this, are pretty smallish on this big page size. I feel uncomfortable about some of the pictures which appear hardly typical of the woods they supposedly represent, and indeed some were replaced in the little book. As "Identifying_Wood" is not a bad book but unsuited for identifying wood, so is this "Encyclopedia_of_Wood" unsuited as a reference.

I don't want to give the impression that it is riddled with errors (I have seen much worse), but it falls well short of the level of, say, "The_International_Book_of_Wood" (1976) let alone of an encyclopedia.

P.S. I do hate the clumsy square shape. Obviously it was not meant to ever come off that coffee table: it decidedly would sit awkward on a shelf among real reference works.

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Second edition (dec 2006)

It is interesting to compare the 2005 second edition with the 1989 first edition. Firstly, the second edition has changed from the rather clumsy square shape to a more convential shape that will fit better on the bookshelf. Secondly, the second edition has retained the heart of the book, the descriptions of 150 woods, but has shifted from presenting two woods per page to one wood per page. This means that more of the book is taken up by these descriptions, and this has been compensated for by deleting the parts on crafted wood, which actually were among the more attractive parts of the book. What has been retained are the parts explaining trees and the structure of wood. These were rather riddled with errors in the first edition, and this does not appear to have been improved. The botanical information is even more out of date than the first time round (botany is on the move).

The 150 woods presented here are not quite the 150 of the first edition, although mostly they are. The presentation of these woods is much affected by the large color pictures: something like a third of the page is taken up by a color photograph of a longitudinal surface. Picture quality is fairly good, but perhaps a little on the dark side. Not always so good is the selection of actual woods to be photographed. It is not possible to understand how anybody could have mistaken the wood on page 46 for Kauri, short of complete blindness. But this is hardly the only failure to match the wood to the description. The descriptions themselves do not appear to have been changed, although the new woods of course do represent new content. This new content has been provided by Nick Gibbs, who also authored the "Real wood bible". The error on pau rosa in the latter book has been incorporated here as well. It is safe to say that all the errors on the identity of wood that are traditionally present in books aimed at the woodworker have been faithfully perpetuated here, yet again.

It is curious to note that although the "Real wood bible" (or its British equivalent "Wood handbook") share an author and a photographer, and were produced by the same publishing group as the present book, there is a quite notable difference in picture quality. The pictures in the "Real wood bible" are distinctly better in quality and more faithful to the original wood than in this book.

All in all, the second edition is not really an improvement on the first edition, losing the information on crafted wood (which made this a good coffee-table book), adopting a color scheme for the world maps that is a lot less clear, etc. Everything that was bad about the first edition appears to have been retained, except the small size of the wood pictures. The second edition loses a star.

For anybody looking for only the one book to own the "Real wood bible" is a much better choice. As the selection of woods is slightly different between these two books (and different pictures appear to have been used throughout) it may be worth owning both, anyway.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good intro book for the beginner, but...., May 30, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Encyclopedia of Wood: A Tree-By-Tree Guide to the World's Most Valuable Resource (Hardcover)

the major strong point of this book, as mentioned by others, are the nice color photos. the biggest complaint I have is with the small number of species listed - only 150, while other books have around 230 or more. this book excludes many of the woods i have used or have in my "shop." although there are many nice pictures in this book, the most important pictures, which are the samples of the different woods, are extremely small and are not always typical in appearance. take cherry for example. there is a nice section near the end that further discusses some of the more "important" or significant woods, such as oak, maple, yew, lignum, rosewood, lime, beech, etc. some sections, such as the discussion on man made boards, are a complete waste of pages in my opinion. I hardly think that a person buying a book about local and exotic woods needs any info on MDF. the only reason i gave this book 3 stars intead of 2 is because there is a pretty good amound of text for each wood listed, though other better books have the same feature. my advice is to save yourself some time and money by buying a book with info on more species

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for the money, but ..., February 12, 2005

By 

Lance Davis (Plantation, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Encyclopedia of Wood: A Tree-By-Tree Guide to the World's Most Valuable Resource (Hardcover)

To start, this is a very nice book, lots of nice pictures of things made from wood, location shots, and as much information as almost anyone would want to know about wood, in general. My problem is with the title word "Encyclopedia". "Thorough Introduction" would have been a better choice. As for the individual woods covered, the author selected about 150 which he expanded on nicely. Considering the thousands of woods in the world, 150 could hardly be considered encyclopedic (unless of course this was just volume one). There is a mixture of common and very obscure woods. I can only assume there was a reason behind the selection process. There was also a considerable bias toward European wood over the western hemisphere. The wood ID photos seemed a bit small at 1.25 inches square (about 3.3 centimeters for the Europeans).
So to sum up: excellent photos (except the tiny wood examples), lots of interesting information, reasonable price, wish there were more woods covered (which would have obviously impacted the price). Knowing what I know now, would I still have bought the book? Yes.