Title: Farm Tools Through the Ages
Author: Michael Partridge
Publisher: New York Graphic Society
Copyright Date: 1973
ISBN: 0821206400
Type: Paperback
Book condition: Very Good
Jacket condition: None as issued

Notes: Clean, solid paperback copy with no writing, highlighting, marks, or creased page corners. Light edge and handling wear to cover; light bend/crease to back cover corner. Binding firm and square; no spine creases. Some wear to spine edges; light sun fading to spine. Good copy for personal use. Published by the New York Graphic Society. Out of print.

About the Book

Farm Tools is a leisurely guide to an earlier, more man-centered age of farming when foot picks, hay kickers, besoms, and barley hummellers were common implements. Michael Partridge has arranged his historical material under such functional headings as cultivations, harvesting, and barn machinery. Individual tasks are then sorted according to the tools and machines that evolved to perform them. The plow, for example, begins as a crude stick for breaking turf and eventually turns into a complicated affair of colters, wheels, moldboards, and shares.

From the Stone AGe to the eighteenth century there was astonishingly little improvement on the basic manual tools of farming. Yet by the close of the nineteenth century America and England had undergone an agricultural upheaval so thorough and final that today most of us are virtually unaware of how it came about.

From augers to zig-zag harrows, Farm Tools illustrates the use and construction of all the basic agricultural implements. Collectors, Sunday farmers, in fact anyone who has ever sat atop a tractor tedding hay or worked a butter churn - or wished he could! - will derive pleasure and profit from this book.

260 black and white illustrations, 240 pages.