Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

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.

I did find the book helpful for some types of wood, however, I also found that some of the discriptions were verbatum to another book that I had. I am not sure who copied who. This book did not list all the common names of some of the more available species where it went overboard on some very obscure species. I also found it lacking in the number of species that it covered. I have many species in my shop that are not mentioned anywhere and they are readily available commecialy.

While the book could have been a little more dense it was a good read overall. I would have liked to have seen more focus on North American hardwoods, but that aside the book was very informative. About 150 different woods are described in detail with acompaning pictures. There is also a nice section on fine furniture. This book is an excellent introduction into the world of wood working and would make a fine gift for anyone with even a passing interest in that direction.

This is a truly comprehensive encyclopedia, liberally illustrated with large photographs--a must for any wood lover. It includes precise descriptions of grain, pattern, figure and color, as well as the relevant harvesting locations, processes and uses. Interesting historical tidbits also add to its richness. Attributes such as stiffness, density, workability, crushing strength, and hardness are specified for each wood. It is a remarkable and beautiful book that I STRONGLY recommend.

This book fills the need for a color reference that can quickly help in the identification of both softwoods and hardwoods. The charts showing the home range of the species greatly helps with ID. I highly recommend this book for use by the interested layman. The color photographs, while small, are a great aid to wood identification for the non-professional. It is an excellent resource.

Scotty Drye, Wood Scientist

A lot of information here but not enough to truly be considered an encyclopedia. The illustrations are nice to be sure, but that's not what I was looking for in this book. On the other hand, The Encyclopedia of Wood was put together by the United States Department of Agriculture so it's as thorough as you could ever want! It covers all the same material as this book, only in more detail, and it's written specifically for people who want to learn about wood in order to work with it safely and efficiently. It's also a better bargain - more book for a smaller price!!

I bought this book for my son-in-law who loves to build all kinds of things out of wood. He was amazed at all the information in it. It is very comprehensive and he just loves it!

This book is loaded with facts about wood and its preservation. Also, the pictures of various woods are outstanding. It is better than four other books (similar ones) THAT I LOOKED AT

It is very useful