Introduction
American Woods by Shelly E. Schoonover was published in 1951 (1st Edition) by Watling & Co. Santa Monica, California. The book is a quick reference tool that was researched and written by Mrs. Schoonover with a concentration on the trees and the medium of wood that comes from trees that are grown mainly in the U.S.A. and Canada.
While the book is over 60 years old, the content is still very relative to the arts, crafts and trades that is woodworking today.
Here, in this archive, I am in the process of transferring the content of American Woods to digital format. The format you are about to view this book in, is not your typical digitized .pdf document that is relatively easy to recreate, by simply removing the pages of a book from the cover and binding, and running them through a scanner, as many archivists do.
Instead what I have done, is manually transfer the content of American Woods by typing the content of the book into our wiki, and by scanning the images from the book and uploading them here, in order to display on the relative pages as they are in the book.
I have also taken the freedoms to use open source images from the world wide web to supplement the pages I recreated from American Woods, in order to bolster the material that Mrs. Schoonover created, and by adding visually stimulating graphics and images.
In Closing
What I am intending to do here is to replicate and buttress a wonderful research project that is held in high regard among forestry experts as one of the most understandable and reliable books about this subject that was written for the every day craftsman, artist, trades-person, and for those who just like this genre of research.
All the credit obviously goes to Mrs. Schoonover in creating the original 1951 work in which she diligently researched and as she pulled in her own expertise in the related field of forestry.
Through all this, I have become familiar with Mrs. Schoonover through clips and quips in research related articles, and I have found that even though she seemed to have been under the radar in her work and professional life as a US Forester, she was well regarded and highly respected among her peers for the research she was involved in, for her time and service in the US Forestry Department, and for her works created as in this "American Woods" project.
Enjoy!
Sincerely
John C. Morris
Create a project
Links of interest
- Handbook of American Woods Second Edition (revised and expanded 1955)
- The Land We Cared For (a PDF book containing honorable mentions of Mrs. Schoonover)
- A Revision of the North American Aphids of the Genus Myzus (a Google book containing credits to Mrs. Schoonover for her work within the stated project)