Applewood Books

The 1921 step-by-step guide to drawing by E.G. Lutz that’s remained a classic for aspiring artists for over a century.

Learn the basics of illustration from influential cartoonist and early animation pioneer E.G. Lutz and start drawing today with Drawing Made Easy. This fun, whimsical beginner’s guide from a century ago offers today’s young artist clear step-by-step instructions and fundamental techniques for approaching a range of useful subjects.  

Easy-to-follow visual examples and straightforward written instructions show how to vividly render a wide selection of flora, fauna, and people in a variety of settings and scenes. Beautiful flowers, soaring birds and butterflies, galloping horses, playful people, and so much more are brought to life on the pages of this lovingly reproduced facsimile reprint. 

E.G Lutz has been guiding aspiring artists across generations, beginning with a young Walt Disney who was inspired by a copy of Animated Cartoons, Lutz’s early guide to animation published in 1920. Now see why Drawing Made Easy remains an essential guide more than one hundred years later. 

Originally published in 1913, this is a lovely reproduction of the first American Girl Scout Handbook.

Author W.J. Hoxie—a naturalist—included tips and tricks for provisioning a camp, tying knots, tending the injured, and telling time by the stars. In 1916, How Girls Can Help Their Country was adapted by Juliette Low into a newer version of the Girl Scout Handbook.  The ranks of the American Girl Scouts have grown from the original eighteen members to the millions of members still active today. Through the decades, each Girl Scout has used some edition of the handbook to learn about everything from camping and first-aid, to housewifery and patriotism. Although the roles of women have changed over the years, the importance of the handbook has not.   Complete with photographs and diagrams, this centennial edition serves as a reference for life in the times of the great-, great-great-, or even great-great-great-grandmothers of today's Scouts.

In 1939 Robert L. May, a copywriter working at Chicago's Montgomery Ward & Co., wrote a holiday story at the request of his employer. Almost two and a half million copies of the little tale about a reindeer with a shiny red nose were given away to all the children who visited Montgomery Ward stores that year. The rest is history. Seventy-five years later, the beloved classic is once again available in a hardcover faithful facsimile of the 1939 Rudolph, with original text and original Denver Gillen illustrations.

Discover one of the most influential textbooks of all time, considered the third-best selling book of all time in America and the most cherished guide to spelling in American history.

With its distinctive blue cover, it earned the nickname the blue-backed speller and was used over the span of nearly a century. This lovingly reproduced hardback is an exact reproduction of Noah Webster's 1824 edition of the American Spelling Book. An essential gift for any history or language lover, this guide remains an inspiration for new generations of spellers today.