Amber · Youth, adventure, character

Daniel Carter Beard

1850–1941

The buildings here suggested require a woodsman more than an architect.

Illustrator, author and outdoor teacher: in 1914 Beard wrote down how a shelter is built in the woods — from a bed of balsam boughs to a log house with a wooden latch — and drew every stage himself.

To the work

The AETERNUS edition

The book of the shelter

The edition gives the complete English text of the 1914 first edition, with Beard’s spelling and wording kept as he wrote them. All 63 plates of his own drawings are reproduced with their original figure numbers and in the groupings of the original pages, because the comparison within a group is part of his teaching. A publisher’s note, an account of the author, an afterword and a glossary of thirty period building terms accompany the work; an editorial note identifies the witness used to supply two pages missing from the principal copy.

SeriesAmber line · Pillar V

First editionNew York, 1914

TextThe author’s own English, first edition

Print edition270 pages · 63 plates

FormatsPaperback · Kindle

Author & context

First the drawing,
then the roof

A draughtsman who taught building by making its parts visible: the frame under the covering, the mechanism inside the latch.

Life & period

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1850, Beard spent part of his childhood in Covington, Kentucky, where the frontier and the figure of Daniel Boone caught his imagination early. He worked in engineering, surveying and mapmaking before turning to professional illustration in New York; the Library of Congress dates his study at the Art Students League to 1880–1884.

Those occupations explain the range of skills his books bring together: observing an object, understanding its structure, and making that structure intelligible on paper.

The draughtsman as teacher

The American Boy’s Handy Book appeared in 1882 under the fuller title What to Do and How to Do It. Beard also illustrated Mark Twain, including the first edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in 1889.

In Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties his method becomes explicit: he says his readers rely more on the diagrams than on the written explanation, and that he has tried to make those diagrams explain themselves.

Scouting & legacy

In 1905 Beard founded the Sons of Daniel Boone; in 1910 he became a cofounder of the Boy Scouts of America, serving as a national Scout commissioner and on its executive board until his death. The outdoor school he established in 1915 gave another setting to the activities he described in print.

He published his autobiography, Hardly a Man Is Now Alive, in 1939 and died at Suffern, New York, in 1941. In the foreword to this book, dated at Flushing on 1 April 1914, he addresses boys, Scoutmasters and sportsmen alike, and later recounts building his own log house at Big Tink Pond — mistakes included.