The American Boy's Handy Book

The book runs by season. Spring is kites — a man kite, a frog kite, a Chinese dragon — and then a chapter on war kites that explains how to fit knives to them and fly them at each other. Summer is home-made boats, blow-guns, boomerangs and how to camp out without a tent. Autumn is traps, dogs and taxidermy. Winter is snow forts with ammunition sleds and shields, ice-boats, and a full puppet-theatre staging of Puss in Boots, script included.

Beard wrote it and drew it, and the drawings do most of the teaching — where the spar crosses, how the rig ties off, what the finished thing looks like from underneath. Scribner's published it in 1882. The instruction is real instruction, written flat and without encouragement: how to build a flat-boat, how to make a rod and reel out of a forked stick and a spool, how to rear a robin. It never pauses to ask whether he should. Beard went on to help found the Boy Scouts of America.

It lands for anyone who likes seeing how things were made before kits, and for a parent willing to do the translating. The reservation is that a fair amount of it is now either illegal or plainly a bad idea. Collecting birds' eggs and keeping wild songbirds are against federal law in the United States. The trapping and taxidermy chapters assume a boy with a knife and no supervision. The fireworks and the knife-armed kites are exactly what they sound like. And it is addressed to boys, in 1882's terms, throughout.