Amber · Youth, adventure, character
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.
AMBER
A bed of balsam boughs, a shelter beneath a fallen tree, a cabin with a wooden latch: Beard begins with what lies close at hand and works towards the construction of a log house. His drawings open roofs to reveal their frames, separate the parts of a fastening, and show how a few tools can be put to work — bark coverings, framed shanties, sod walls, raised camps and log buildings across forty-nine chapters.
Explore the edition →Life & context
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 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.
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.
