A book about firewood sold more than 200,000 copies in Norway and Sweden and sat on their bestseller lists for over a year. That is the fact people quote, and it is a fair warning about what is inside: this is not a pamphlet on splitting logs, it is an attempt to explain why a grown man will spend a Saturday building a woodpile and then stand back and look at it.

Eight chapters take it in order. The Cold. The Forest. The Tools. The Chopping Block. The Woodpile. The Seasoning. The Stove. The Fire. Mytting collected the material by going to people who are serious about wood, combustion researchers and silviculturists as well as enthusiasts, and then trying most of it himself. He dried finely chopped oak in his kitchen oven. He failed to build a beehive woodpile. He misjudged where a felled pine was going.

Fifty five color photographs carry the second half of the argument. The contents page faces a wall of split birch ends. The Forest opens on a stand of tall pines against a deep green chapter board. A logging road runs out of the frame stacked with fresh trunks. A man in a knitted cap stands behind the long stack he has just built on the snow, his skis planted upright beside it. A log cabin sits buried to its window ledges below a hillside of snow laden spruce. A long open woodshed, its plank roof weighted down with old tires, is packed to the eaves with split wood and lit from behind by low sun.

This is the US edition, fully updated from the Norwegian original, and it carries an appendix of US based resources and contacts, so the buying advice is usable here rather than admirable from a distance.

Hardcover, 192 pages, 6 by 9 in. Abrams Image, 6 October 2015. ISBN-13 9781419717987.

Pair it with Buchanan-Smith's Axe Handbook Take the Swedish coffee break with Fika Bake your way through Scandinavia