By Eric Sloane
ISBN: 0896585654
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Voyageur Press (MN)
Your price: $16.95
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Reviewed for Carbon County News by Gary Robson on 12/03/2001
Do you like to know why things are built the way they are? Eric Sloane does. Eric Sloane's an Age of Barns: An Illustrated Review of Classic Barn Styles and Construction annotated sketchbook looks at the American barn and why it looks like it does. The book is filled with drawings of different barn designs, floor plans, and descriptions of how people thought when they designed those barns.
Sloane starts by looking at barnmaking tools and processes, and what barns were originally used for. He explains how to determine the age of a barn, and what you can tell about the original farmer or rancher that built it.
If you're looking for a guidebook on building your own barn, "An Age of Barns" isn't it. If you're looking for ideas, or if you just love the look of antique barns, this is your book. It covers silos, smokehouses, spring houses, root cellars, corn cribs, sugar houses, tobacco barns, sheep barns, milk barns, horse barns, round barns, storage sheds, and every other imaginable kind of barn.
There's plenty of detail, too. Sloane's sketches cover doors, hinges, ventilation techniques, roof designs, tools, nails, and much more. It shows the difference between a gambrel roof, a gable-on-hip roof, a pentroof, and a Dutch slice-hip.
There isn't a lot of text in the book--perhaps a paragraph per page--but it's well researched and ties the drawings together. There are some wonderful bits of trivia tucked into the text. When making riven clapboards, the tool used to split the boards is called a froe. Why? Because you smack it with a maul, and then rock it "to and froe."
If you build barns, you'll call this a reference book. If not, consider it a coffee table book. After reading it, you'll find yourself stopping by the side of the road, looking at a barn, and thinking, "I know why they did that..."