AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The exhaustion of the first editionof this book, within so short a time of its publication, makes itdifficult to add much new matter for the reissue now called for, or, inthe light of subsequent research and experience, to revise what hadalready been written.
Any book that seemed to show a way of meeting the present buildingdifficulties, however partially, was fairly assured of a welcome, butthe somewhat unforeseen demand for my small contribution to the greatvolume of literature on cottage-building is, I think, to beattributed chiefly to its description of Pisé-building.
Of the very large number of letters that reach me from readers of thebook, quite ninety-nine out of every hundred are concerned withPisé.
The other methods of building have their advocates and exponents, butit is clearly Pisé that has caught the attention of the public as wellas of the Press both at home and abroad, and it is to this method ofconstruction that I have chiefly devoted my attention since the writingof the book as it first appeared.
In our English climate Pisé-building is a summer craft, and thesmall-scale experiments of one person through a single summer cannot inthe nature of things add very greatly to the sum of our knowledge ofwhat is possible with Pisé and of what is not.
Most of the new data have come through the building of Mr. Strachey’sdemonstration house, an account of which is included in the presentvolume.
At the time of writing,