July 18, 2010: Wooden Books

[xoxoxoBruce]

I suppose you could say most books a made of wood, since that's the source of most paper.
But Pavlova University, in Italy, has a collection of circa 1800 books, that really are wood.

Each volume is about a different species of tree, with its cover made from the wood of that tree, showing both wood radial, longitudinal, and cross profiles. And on each spine is a section of the tree's bark.

While it would have been impossible for them to know this in the early 1800s, collecting these samples in this way was far better than simply writing or drawing accounts of the trees. As modern science can now read the DNA contained in these samples - and see the blueprint for the trees themselves - each of these strange wooden books contains more information then 10,000 pages of prose ever could have.

It's a shame half of these books have been lost... maybe they kept the other half warm.

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