FixitUpFind: The Ax Book

Got a tool-geek on your gift list? (I mean “geek” in the best possible light I hasten to add.)

Are you happily addicted to your tools and how they work?

Do you like to know where the tools in the home center came from and why they are—or aren’t—there?

If any of these apply to you, then (first) congratulations, consider your life guided by tools and searching for reasons to use them. And (second) you just might want to go totally native and pick up The Ax Book: The Lore and Science of the Woodcutter by D. Cook. Kind of like Witold Rybczynski’s book One Good Turn, I find the Ax Book hard to put down. It’s not just a sharp look at what you might claim is a top-fiver tool in human history, but because of how detailed a look it is at such a simple, everyday thing. What I also relish is that, arcane as some of it is, Dudley speaks regularly of professional woodcutters harvesting timber in the Maine Woods with double-bitted axes, it would seem, from both memory and experience. He is an eyewitness to a past we will never see. Yet, even though he writes of the chainsaw and the change it brings to the woods—and his main topic: cutting and splitting firewood for home use—his appreciation for the simplicity and effectiveness of his ax’s “keen bit” is palpable and, in a way, eternal. He loves it and you can tell. He knows just about everything about an axe that it seems possible to know—and that passion is kind of addictive to me.

But forget about love for a second, from a purely utilitarian point of view, Cook covers some cool stuff you can use: everything from felling and splitting to bit sharpening and stacking firewood. A truly authentic, albeit specific, view of tools and life, the Ax Book is a sharp read penned by a strong-willed woodsman. Take a whack at it.