36. Romeyn Beck Hough, The American Woods

An unparalleled work of taxonomy

Romeyn Beck Hough was a physician-turned-botanist obsessed with a single, audacious idea: that a book about trees should be made of trees. For 25 years, from 1888 to 1913, he produced 13 volumes of The American Woods, each containing cardboard plates that held three paper-thin slices of a single species—transverse, radial, and tangential cuts—so fine they glowed when held to the light. A final volume was published posthumously by his daughter, and the complete 14-volume set comprises 1,056 slices of 354 different North American tree species. It was, and is, an unparalleled work of taxonomy.

Hough’s initial impulse was entrepreneurial. He patented a veneer-cutting machine capable of slicing wood to extraordinary thinness, creating wooden cards thin enough to serve as Magic Lantern slides and strong enough to use as business cards. Then, inspired by volumes of European tree cross-sections, Hough set out to do the same for American trees. Each species was represented by three mounted sections, accompanied by text detailing its botany, habitat, and commercial uses.

In retrospect, The American Woods reads like an elegy. Hough presumably didn’t know he was making a before-image of the extent of American forests at the end of the 19th century. The American chestnut, once a keystone canopy tree, would be functionally erased within decades by blight. With some of the trees it documents now exceedingly rare, the series stands for woods in two senses—both the material and the forests themselves that once felt infinite. The books have become the specimens.

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Links:

• The American Woods - Public Domain Review

• Facsimile of The American Woods published by Taschen

• Images of the entire series - The Internet Archive

• “A View from the Vault: Romeyn Beck Hough’s The American Woods,” by Jaime Margalotti, University of Delaware Special Collections, April 12, 2023

• Romeyn Beck Hough - Wikipedia

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

I’m looking for ideas for this series — have something you’d like me to consider for inclusion? Please feel free to leave a comment!