Lost Art Press

An Impressive Book Collection (You Can Peruse)

Posted on by Lost Art Press

Typically, I’m not a fan of Print on Demand (POD) publishers who take low-quality scans of books in the public domain and sell them alongside antique books. I have been fooled a couple times and ordered a POD book by accident.

But here is one exception. The Forgotten Books website in the UK is a massive collection of public domain works that are well-indexed. There I have found about a dozen woodworking books I had never heard of thanks to the site. 

There are school manuals for woodworking, William Fairham’s “Woodwork Joints” and more than 100 others.

If you really want to buy one of these books, go ahead. I can offer no promises on the print quality. However, you can preview each title as a guest, and you get to see quite a lot of the interior of the book. More than enough to decide if it’s a book you are willing to chase down on the secondhand market, or perhaps find through archive.org or one of the many other sites that archive scans.

It’s a big list. I think you’ll enjoy paging through it.

— Christopher Schwarz

20 thoughts on “An Impressive Book Collection (You Can Peruse)”

  1. Thanks for sharing this Chris. WOW, looks like a great opportunity to research some great info.

  3. Is there a secret to looking at these? When I open the book, as a guest, some of the letters are much bigger than the rest obscuring the text.

      1. Thanks, Jim. I had the same problem. Being stubborn about wanting to use my iPad for the previews, I have found that if I request the mobile website, it works on my iPad. The mobile website is requested by tapping the two As in the address bar.

  4. Love this. I found a book, “The art of carving” by Thomas M. Hilliard, published in 1899. But when I previewed it, it’s all about carving meat! 😀

  5. I’ve purchased a number of titles from Forgotten books over the past few years & although they are supplied in a smaller footprint, they contain a wealth of information that’s nearly impossible to find in current publications. Highly recommended.

  6. Quite a few of these are also available on archive.org, which is an excellent resource for old-source material, especially written in English.

  8. This is a wonderful source. Thank you for sharing! What guides Lost Art Press in deciding which books to reprint?

  11. Hi Chris! Thank you for sharing this wonderful resource! I have a few woodworking books whose covers look almost identical to these. Do you know if any of these books happen to show up on Amazon?

  12. As an avid student of Mary May, I immediately opened “The Art of Carving”.

    Chapter 1: Sirloin of Beef

    )

    Thanks for the great list.

  13. And to think I’ve lived this long without a book on Poultry Architecture! Thanks Chris – great find.

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