For those who can never get enough ideas for designing projects, I stumbled onto a great service offered by Google. Google now has a book feature that offers many books for download, many of which may be of interest to woodworkers and artisans. Some of the books are only previews so you can decide if you want to buy them. If you select “Full View Books” when typing in your search words, however, all of the results will be entire books that can be downloaded for free in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format.

The books I found when looking for carving techniques and illustrations were typically from the 19th century or early 20th century. Because their copyrights have expired, Google is able to offer them free of charge.

If you’re interested, just go to http://books.google.com and give it a try. It’s like being able to walk into a 19th century library and walk out with whatever interests you…for free!