The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors; A Tale of architectural Choice and Craftsmanship

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. First U.S. Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Catherine Petroski (Photographs). xii, [2], 297, [7] pages. Photographer's Note. List of Illustrations (80 photographs) and Credits. Bibliography. Index. Inscribed on the title page by Henry Petroski and signed on the title page by Catherine Petroski. Inscription reads To Chris O'Toole, a man of many talents, with best regards, Henry Petroski. Henry Petroski (February 6, 1942 - June 14, 2023) was an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University, he was also a prolific author. Petroski has written over a dozen books - beginning with To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985) and including a number of titles detailing the industrial design history of common, everyday objects, such as pencils, paper clips, toothpicks, and silverware. His first book was made into the film When Engineering Fails. He was a frequent lecturer and a columnist for the magazines American Scientist and Prism. Before beginning his work at Duke in 1980, Petroski worked at the University of Texas at Austin from 1968-74 and for the Argonne National Laboratory from 1975-80. In 2004, Petroski was appointed to the United States Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board and was reappointed in 2008. Catherine Petroski (born 1939), born Catherine Groom in St. Louis, Missouri, is an American writer and photographer. She is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. A Bride's Passage: Susan Hathorn's Year Under Sail, won the John Lyman Prize for Biography, hailed as "a valuable social history of a maritime family in mid-19th-century New England. An architectural whodunit that unlocks the secrets of a hand-built home. When Henry Petroski and his wife Catherine bought a charming but modest six-decades-old island retreat in coastal Maine, Petroski couldn't help but admire its unusual construction. An eminent expert on engineering, history, and design, he began wondering about the place's origins and evolution: Who built it, and how? What needs, materials, technologies, historical developments, and laws shaped it? How had it fared through the years with its various inhabitants?
Sleuthing around dimly lit closets, knotty-pine wall panels, and even a secret passage, but never removing so much as a nail, Petroski zooms in on the details but also steps back to examine the structure in the context of its time and place. Catherine Petroski's beautiful photographs capture the clues and the atmosphere. A vibrant cast of neighbors and past residents, most notably the house's masterful creator, an engineer-turned- folk architect, become key characters in the story. As the mystery unfolds, revealing an extraordinary house and its environs, this ode to loving design will leave readers enchanted and inspired.