The American Boy's Handy Book

Camp, explore, hike, discover, learn woodcraft—get outdoors and be at home in nature all through the year! There’s so much to do and discover with this truly Handy Book as a guide. Written for children in 1882, and valuable for kids or adults today, the author suggests projects, crafts, plans, games, and schemes for camping trips, hikes, or the backyard. It contains plans for 16 kinds of kites and hot-air balloons and fishing tackle, how to make and stock an aquarium, to construct a water telescope and how to camp out without a tent. Or in a hut made from pine boughs. How to build 10 kinds of boats, including a flatboat with a covered cabin. Iceboats, too. Squirt guns with astonishing range and authority. One-person canoes. Bird calls. Daniel Carter Beard, a founder of the scouting movement in America, helped preserve invaluable folkways that can instill self-reliance and a deeper appreciation of nature—all while having a world of fun for all ages. If Huckleberry Finn were to settle down, somewhere out there in the territory, and decide to become an author, he might very well come up with a book like this one . . . evoking the kind of boyhood that nearly every American man would like to have had himself, and hope that his son (or daughter) might still enjoy. —Washington Post Book World The Handy Book was the perfect survival manual. It contained plans for 16 kinds of kites and hot-air balloons and fishing tackle. It told you how to make and stock an aquarium, to construct a water telescope and how to camp out without a tent. Or in a hut made from pine boughs. How to build 10 kinds of boats, including a flatboat with a covered cabin. Iceboats, too. One-person canoes. Bird calls. Squirt guns with astonishing range and authority. Today you can be privy to all these splendid secrets . . . printed on acid-free paper and sewn in signatures, it will last to be handed down to you great-grandboys. —Henry Kisor, The Chicago Sun-Times Fascinating projects guaranteed to teach and amuse for hours, and, since much has changed since 1882, a lot of those young readers will be girls. —Saint Petersburg Times