I'm rather curious about this one:


It's nonfiction, seriously.

S'bout how we used to design/build things(furniture, buildings, tools, vessels, vehicles, etc), kind of as a foil to how we design and build them now.

The basic thrust of it is as a sort of crash course in learning to see, evaluate, and use, a system which is much more based on proportions and classical orders, and hardly takes into account specific measured dimension at all, except as it relates to whatever the general size a thing needs to be specifically for its intended purpose/use. [e.g. a table has to be about the height that is comfortable for a human to sit or stand at it. The specific inch dimension of that height is much less important, and indeed, as we used to do such things, could vary a fair bit depending on who, specifically will be using the table.]

So, the book aims to sort of teach one how to catch their own fish in a way. Rather than say, showing how to take a long chart of exact inch dimensions CAD drawings and building a copy of something, without understanding where the shapes and lengths are coming from, it is about learning the whys and hows of the way that our old solid things were brought to life as designs. Which is one of those utterly simple sorts of method, where the simplicity is not at all readily apparent in the finished items. Which is a wonky way of saying: Simple movements and concepts that produce complex and effective systems and designs.

Very interesting book, a lot of sort of drawing exercise stuff to sort of allow one to work the tricks out themselves rather than simply being told what to do.

Yarr, as a matter of fact, i got this one from Lee Valley(along with a small pile of waterstones and diamond shit for sharpening things).

http://www.leevalley.com/US/wood/page.a ... 6096,46109

It was kind of pricy for a little book at $35ish, but it is a smaller publisher, has a bunch of color images in it, and i am really enjoying the subject and angle it comes from. For me personally, the thing is worth it.

Sounds just about perfect.

Peace, plenty and contentment lie before us; and a new life, with new experiences, new opportunities, new vigor, new romance, folded in that golden future when the meadows and the bayous of our Southern lands shall swarm with herds of hippopotami

The old scouts had taught him that reliance on a firearm decayed a man's courage and made him worthless in hand-to-hand combat

Once, he hid for two days and nights inside an aardvark hole. Another time, he floated down a river disguised as a dead cow, drifting under a fresh, fleshy hide with two eyeholes cut out of it, to size up an enemy camp downstream.

The Boers had been given index cards describing the famous Frederick Russell Burnham- a supposedly ruthless, godless, illiterate rogue from the American West. Realizing this, Burnham sparked an erudite theological debate with one of his captors- was baptism by immersion the one true route to salvation, or was it baptism by sprinkling?

Cocke stood at Ball's Ford