Peter Buchanan-Smith founded Best Made Co. and spent a decade looking harder at one tool than almost anyone alive. This is the book that came out of it, and its six part promise is printed across the bottom of the jacket: knowing, buying, using, hanging, restoring, adorning.

Chapter one takes an axe apart and names every piece of it. The head diagram labels the cheek, toe, bit, heel, poll, lug, bevel and eye; the helve diagram labels the wedge, shoulder, back, belly, grip, end grip and kerf slot. Once you have that vocabulary the rest of the book has something to talk to you with, which is why the chapter comes first.

The axe-onomy pages then lay out the regional head patterns side by side, single bit and single bit with lug, each drawn to shape and named: Maine Wedge, Michigan, Long Island, Delaware, Dayton, Connecticut, Baltimore Jersey, Kentucky, Narrow Wisconsin, New England, Rockaway, North Carolina. It is the spread that turns a wall of second hand axe heads at a farm sale into things you can identify.

The Most Underrated Part of Your Axe is a full page photograph of the author's own collection of steel wedges pulled out of past restorations, facing the argument the page actually makes: an axe works best when the head stays attached to the helve, and the one critical piece almost everyone overlooks in keeping it there is the wedge. Dynamics of the Strike is the chapter that explains why a calm swing outcuts a hard one. A later spread puts you in a working forge, where a maker sharpens the bit of a carving axe on a belt grinder using a jig he built himself.

Hardcover, 240 pages, 6 by 9 in. Abrams Image, 11 May 2021. ISBN-13 9781419747670.

It sits next to The Woodland Homestead and The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals on our country living shelf.