Flynn - The Complete Guide to Building with Rocks & Stone : Stonework Projects and Techniques Explained Simply.

A few years back we lost our beloved pet dog Bear, who was not only our best and dearest friend but also the Vice President of Sunshine here at Atlantic Publishing. He did not receive a salary but worked tirelessly 24 hours a day to please his parents.

Bear was a rescue dog who turned around and showered myself, my wife, Sherri, his grandparents Jean, Bob, and Nancy, and every person and animal he met (well, maybe not rabbits) with friendship and love. He made a lot of people smile every day.

We wanted you to know a portion of the profits of this book will be donated in Bears memory to local animal shelters, parks, conservation organizations, and other individuals and nonprofit organizations in need of assistance.

Douglas and Sherri Brown

PS: We have since adopted two more rescue dogs: first Scout, and the following year, Ginger. They were both mixed golden retrievers who needed a home.

Want to help animals and the world? Here are a dozen easy suggestions you and your family can implement today:

• Adopt and rescue a pet from a local shelter.
• Support local and no-kill animal shelters.
• Plant a tree to honor someone you love.
• Be a developer put up some birdhouses.
• Buy live, potted Christmas trees and replant them.
• Make sure you spend time with your animals each day.
• Save natural resources by recycling and buying recycled products.
• Drink tap water, or filter your own water at home.
• Whenever possible, limit your use of or do not use pesticides.
• If you eat seafood, make sustainable choices.
• Support your local farmers market.
• Get outside. Visit a park, volunteer, walk your dog, or ride your bike.

Five years ago, Atlantic Publishing signed the Green Press Initiative. These guidelines promote environmentally friendly practices, such as using recycled stock and vegetable-based inks, avoiding waste, choosing energy-efficient resources, and promoting a no-pulping policy. We now use 100-percent recycled stock on all our books. The results: in one year, switching to post-consumer recycled stock saved 24 mature trees, 5,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of the total energy used for one home in a year, and the equivalent of the greenhouse gases from one car driven for a year.

Authors Commentary

A man who works with his hands is a laborer;
a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

Louis Nizer

As a child, I remember watching my father work with concrete and stone, pouring slabs for the foundation of our home, which he built from the ground up. I was fascinated by how he just knew how much cement to put in the huge, metal mixing trough, and when he added water, he used the garden hose, never measuring, working a hoe in a back-and-forth fashion until the mixture was just right. He fashioned stones for the patio from concrete, poured the foundation for our carport and sidewalks, and created steps. He built barbecue pits, stone walls, and rock gardens. He put stone and brick veneers on our A-frame house.

I took this knowledge and subsequently built brick planters and stone walls for my own home later in life and learned the trade of setting tile, creating entire floors for my patios, bathrooms, and later, my art gallery. I do mosaics and love to work with stone in my art.

I always collect rocks and stone from all my travels, from the granite country of Maine to the Irish Sea on the south of Ireland where miles of marvelously rounded stones exist. I have rocks from the Appalachian Mountains holding books in place on my bookshelf and have built miniature cairns as paperweights on my desk. There is never an instance I do not get dazzled by a particularly unusually shaped stone and pick it up to put in my pocket.

I hope you enjoy and use this book well. It has been a long and careful process in developing it.

Introduction: The Beauty and Strength of Stone

Because of its superior strength, beauty, and longevity, stone has provided a readily available, natural building material for thousands of years. Stone structures appeal to us psychologically because they represent security and provide a sense of protection. Stone is also one of the oldest construction materials known to man. Excavations of stone circles in Great Britain and Eastern Europe are believed to be rudimentary living structures that date back to 12000 B.C. Early stonemasons in Egypt built the pyramids from hand-quarried rock beginning in about 2600 B.C., applying techniques of dry stone masonry not using an adhesive cement called mortar that people still use today.