Great new wood identification book

[phinds]

Eric Meier, who runs The Wood Database web site has now published a really good wood book, called "Wood! Identifying and Using Hundreds of Woods Worldwide".

It’s better than most of the other reference books I have. The introductory chapters about wood structure, etc, are REALLY good. He’s clearly put a lot of time, research, and thought into this and it shows. No book with just introductory chapters on wood characteristics will ever rival Hoadley’s  “Understanding Wood”, but Eric's is better than most such sets of introductory chapters and it might be the best around. I haven’t read enough detail yet to be sure.

Another bit of good news is that he covers a lot of woods. I haven't counted them but the "Hundreds" in the title is not an exaggeration.

Like all books, its biggest drawback in being helpful for wood ID is that it has only one picture of each wood. As we all know, most woods don't really have a "representative" look that would help ID every piece of that wood. That's why my site has LOTS of pics of each wood.

Eric chose to use a full size image, so it is of necessity of a very modest sized area (about 4" square) of each sample. The good news about this is that it shows the graininess of the face quite well. The bad news is that it's too close up to give a good feel for what the a plank of the wood actually looks like. Eric has also included a picture for most of the more common woods of an object made using the wood, which helps.

His choice of pieces of each wood to photograph is good, his photography is excellent, and the color plates are good but do suffer pretty severely from the problem of darkening. I corresponded w/ Eric about this and he is frustrated by it. His original images were quite good and in the proof copy he approved they looked good on the page, but when they were printed on glossy paper, there was a lot of darkening. The affect of this on the accuracy of the wood color varies, but it's a problem in all such books.

A further advantage of this book is that Eric has images of, and discussions of, the end grain closeups that can be so important in doing wood identification. Sadly, the darkening of the pics is the worst on some of these, compounded by a loss of contrast/detail, to the point of making them not very useful. The end grain pics on Erics site are much better.

Like most such references that have end grain pics (the few that HAVE end grain pics) it suffers from the fact that it's not much help in identifying a wood unless you have a pretty good guess about what wood it is, or at least can narrow it down to a small number of possibilities. That's why on my site's anatomy pages I categorize the end grain pics so that you can use the characteristics of an unknown wood to target the search (for example, ring porous -> large rays -> etc.). Hoadley has a decision tree that helps do the same thing.

Anyway, I consider this a great addition to my bookshelf. Eric said it took him 6 years to get it done and I believe it. It was time well spent.
 
It's available on Amazon for $35 plus shipping, which I consider quite reasonable.

Here's a pic of a randomly chosen couple of pages:

[-MattK-]

I bought this book on @phinds recommendation above - and I think it's great. He did a nice job of choosing the right information to put on the page - I particularly appreciate the commentary on: color/appearance, grain/texture, rot resistance, workability, allergies/toxicity, pricing/availability (US-centric), sustainability, common uses. 

He also has data: where it grows, how big it grows, weight, specific gravity, hardness (janka), bending strength, elasticity, crushing strength, shrinkage (including the "patterns" of shrinking - radial, tangential, volumetric, ratio of tangential to radial).

Plus a few pictures.  That's a ton of information crammed into one page!

Only nit / pet peeve (and it's a small one!) is the page numbering - not every page has a number on it.  So when you've found a reference in the index and you're scanning for the page, you can find a run of pages with no or few numbers on them.  (it's because some pages have pictures of projects made from the wood in the spot where the page number would be).