Rob Penn

An agreeable, finely-balanced book that sees the author, Robert Penn, cut down an ash tree in his local forest and then seek to make (or rather, commission people to make) all sorts of tools and artefacts from the timber. This allows Penn to guide us through a gentle education in logging, woodworking, carpentry, crafting and environmental sustainability, teaching the reader more things about wood than we thought we'd even want to know – and finding it's actually quite interesting to learn. show more Penn is adept enough as a writer to go off onto eclectic tangents, and I was pleased to learn tidbits of information like how fletchers would use feathers from the same bird's wing on their wooden arrows (left-wing or right-wing) so that they flew straight and true (pg. 132).

A key strength of the book is that it's sincere; Penn mostly avoids the limp comedy and faux-jauntiness that usually characterises books of this type and which only highlight their authors' (or, more likely, their publishers') lack of confidence. The book is well-written, even if it's not especially remarkable; it's quiet without being especially profound. I kept expecting it to take on a higher gear that it never found and the journey ended before I was ready for it. That said, if the book had been twice the length it may have become tedious; the book's 240 pages was just about enough to hear someone talk about wood.

It's quite a wonderful book, in its way, never outstaying its welcome but never demanding our attention either. There's a relaxed serenity about it, and about the growth and use of wood as a material in itself. One homeware craftsman Penn speaks to in the Epilogue remarks how customers at their market stand are always keen to touch and smell their wooden wares (pg. 225), and there's an honesty and earthiness to our relationship with wood that Penn is looking to highlight. "The pleasure we take from things made from natural materials is an extension of the pleasure we take from nature itself," he writes on page 12, and I think it's for this reason that, where possible, I personally have always sought wooden objects over metal and plastic, regardless of cost, and always read paper books over e-books. In a world of disposable plastic objects and mass-produced impermanence and isolation, an item that has been crafted, thought out, and which you retain for perhaps your whole life becomes something to cherish. Penn's book goes further than this, extolling the virtues of forests and walking in nature, but I will remember it primarily as a paean to these simple acts of consumerism we can take to reintroduce a bit of quality and resonance back into our atomised modern lives. show less

This is a gem of a book. Rob Penn has had a lifelong love of trees and wooden artefacts. In 2014 he selected a mature ash tree in a forest and, with the aid of local experts, cut it down with a view to seeing how many useful items he could make, or have made for him, from the wood it yielded. The list of items is astounding. The book is, however, so much more than a simple catalogue of artefacts.

Penn encounters some amazing artisans, all of whom share a deep love for working with wood, and show more take an immense pride in working to historic methods. Ash is one of our most prevalent trees, and archaeological evidence from around the world suggests that its wood has been used by humans for at least five thousand years. Among its many attractive qualities are its simple abundance, augmented by the fact that it grows very quickly, usually with a very even grain structure. When properly seasoned it also loses more of its natural moisture content that most similar woods, making it lighter than them.

Penn travels the country to visit the specialist workers who make the various items for him. He offers a loving description of their workmanship, and the care and attention that they bring to their respective crafts. He also goes in to the history of the various items he commissions, which allows him to go off at tangents, for example explaining the history of the Irish game of hurling or chronicling the development of the toboggan. One chapter (The Crack of the Bat) sees him visiting America where he has a baseball bat made for him. This is a cue for a potted history of the baseball bat. I can imagine my friends rolling their eyes and smirking as they read that, feeling that a history of the baseball bat was just what they needed to make their lives complete, though I can assure them that this little adjunct was riveting, just as all his other sidebars are.

Penn writes with great clarity but tremendous enthusiasm, and I was left feeling very envious of the various objects he amassed from his single felled tree. show less

It seems hard to believe that a book about a man cutting down a tree and getting people to make things out of it would be enthralling and moving, but it is. It expertly taps into some deep human need to have to own things made well out of wood. As I was reading I was lamenting that there was no such ode to our native New Zealand trees, many of them with beautiful hard-wearing timber that doesn't seem to be used or appreciated the way northern hemisphere trees are, with thousands of years of show more coexistence with people. I'm sending this book straight off to a timber engineer I know who makes his own furniture, and hoping he hasn't read it already. show less

I would not have thought a book about the ash tree would be that interesting. It's sort of a long-term human favorite wood due to its properties. It's all around us as tool handles, baseball bats, kitchen implements, sporting gear, trim, hoops - a generic white wood that is both strong and able to bend without snapping. The writing quality is high with a mix of biography, travel, cultural and natural history. There's a ton of interesting stuff here well told. I became so interested in the show more section about the medieval practice of eating from ash plates and bowls that I found a maker (in France none in the US) and ordered one. Such are the unexpected costs of reading. show less