In the coming months, we will be featuring some of the rare and incredible books in our personal library here at Atelier Viollet. Whether for reference or simply for the sake of collecting unique relics of the history of furniture and interior craftsmanship, Jean-Paul Viollet loves the process of locating these gems and adding them to our growing library.
Today we’re featuring American Woods, by R. B. Hough: the 3rd edition, published in 1910. American Woods is a 13-volume set originally published in 1888. It is a compilation of nearly all the different types of American trees that were known at the time. But rather than simply showing images of the leaves or bark as many field guides might, each book in this set includes actual slices of wood from the trees”roughly 1,000 slices in all, representing more than 300 extremely rare species.
Each page is a card consisting of three specimens of wood cut from radial, transverse and tangential perspectives in order to illustrate the wood’s grain as fully as possible. Undoubtedly, this is one of the rarest most valuable set of books we have in our library.
