Wilson's Carpentry and Joinery
Book of 240 pages with stained brown linen cover that has come away at the spine and is fraying at top edge. There are two loose pages at the back and a pasted-in hand-drawn plan of a roof and dormer window.
This is 'Wilson's Carpentry and Joinery' by John Wilson, being the 14th edition of the October of 1903, price three shillings net, printed at the Hotspur Press in Whitworth Street West, Manchester and supplied to the trade by John Heywood of London and Manchester.
There is a neat pencil inscription on the first endpaper, 'George Calder, Joiner, Clashmore -- 1904 and a pencil flourish, followed by a verse dedication in ink thus:
''If thou art borrowed by a friend,
Right welcome shall he be
to read to study not to lend
but to return to me.
Not that imparted knowledge doth
diminish learning's store
But books I find if often lent
Return to me no more.''
On the opposite send of the first endpaper we have the following in pencil --
Keep to your working lines and make your whole work the perfection of neatness, nothing else will pass muster, an inspector won't look at a clumsy worked article.
There are two illegible pencil letters followed by the aphorism in brackets ''A thing of beauty is a Joy for ever'' (from Keats' Endymion).
On the reverse of the title page is a quotation from Rossetti's sonnet ''Think thou and act'' running thus --
''Miles and miles distant though the last line be,
And thou thy soul sails leagues and leagues beyond,
Still leagues beyond those leagues there is more sea''
And finally the aphorism ''Eternal perfecting is man's vocation'', which is close to an line from Fichte's Absolute Vocation of Man.
Dimensions: Width 252 mm - Length155 mm thickness 14 mm