Woodcraft Hardcover – April 18, 2025

Part of the Historic Adirondack Reprint Series• All original artwork is included.• Full Text and fully indexed.• Edited, proof-read, and formatted specifically for multiple devices and print options.• New Introduction for the 2025 reprint EditionOnly to him whose coat of rags Has pressed at night her regal feet, Shall come the secrets, strange and sweet, Of century pines and beetling crags.For him the goddess shall unlock The golden secrets which have lain Ten thousand years, through frost and rain, Deep in the bosom of the rock. - NessmukGeorge Washington Sears (1821-1890) was an early advocate and popularizer of camping and canoeing. He wrote primarily for Field and Stream under the pen name Nessmuk. The lakes and forests of the Adirondacks were among his favorite places to travel, and it was there that he found boatbuilders who could produce the kind of lightweight canoe that he envisioned, what came to be known locally as the Nessmuk canoe. Subsequent models included the 16 pound Susan Nipper and his renowned Sairy Gamp. Many of his ideas and innovations are reflected in the huge popularity of ultra-light solo canoes that are today used everywhere.His camping and hunting advice is very much a product of his time, and his techniques have perhaps not themselves aged as well as his boat-building innovations, given that he relates catching 350 trout in a day and would habitually build huge fires to burn all night. For the time, though, it was nature centered travel with a focus on minimalism of the material goods you carried and the efficient use of forest resources, rather than the long term impact of, and the actual amount of, resources you used up in the forest. Of course, in those days, travelers were infrequent enough that the forest could recover. His philosophy around the curative powers of the woods is as relevant to the stresses of today’s society as it was to his world.Woodcraft is his most famous work. It is a quick read, and covers his opinions on a wide range of subjects about society as well as its core subject of lightweight and efficient tramping. It went through a number of revisions and editions, and this new reprint edition is intended to make available in digital and print formats a faithful version of the first edition.Nothing has been changed in the text except for two racist phrases that were too egregious to ignore. In one case the clause has simply been omitted. In the other, a word has been substituted, as the phrase in the text was not, in fact, used in the manner or meaning of the modern day.Notes on Formatting and Editing:This edition does not rely on basic pasting of a pdf or simple OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scanning, practices which can result in an unpleasant reading experience. It has been closely read and edited line by line to eliminate any reproduction quality or transcription issues. Electronic and print versions have been individually formatted to account for layout differences. A few details may be missed, but as found they will be corrected in future releases.To improve the layout and flow of text, the locations of some illustrations have been altered slightly to better fit with page and paragraph breaks. They are otherwise fundamentally in the same locations.Some tables or charts may have been converted to images, as this is easier to present across various devices.Except for obvious typesetting errors spelling remains as presented in the original text, including inconsistencies such as varied hyphen usage or antiquated vs. modern forms.This includes commas. Nessmuk’s comma usage is out of control, and applied in uniformly inconsistent ways. Thus, it would be very difficult to determine what was a typo and what was simply overenthusiastic usage, so they have been left as is. Read more