Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk and Clay: A Renaissance (2nd edition)

Cob House built by Mr. Ernest Gimson, near Budleigh Salterton, Devon.
Frontispiece ]

The exhaustion of the first edition of this book, within so short a time of its publication, makes it difficult to add much new matter for the reissue now called for, or, in the light of subsequent research and experience, to revise what had already been written.
Any book that seemed to show a way of meeting the present building difficulties, however partially, was fairly assured of a welcome, but the somewhat unforeseen demand for my small contribution to the great volume of literature on cottage-building is, I think, to be attributed chiefly to its description of Pisé-building.
Of the very large number of letters that reach me from readers of the book, quite ninety-nine out of every hundred are concerned with Pisé.
The other methods of building have their advocates and exponents, but it is clearly Pisé that has caught the attention of the public as well as of the Press both at home and abroad, and it is to this method of construction that I have chiefly devoted my attention since the writing of the book as it first appeared.
In our English climate Pisé-building is a summer craft, and the small-scale experiments of one person through a single summer cannot in the nature of things add very greatly to the sum of our knowledge of what is possible with Pisé and of what is not.
Most of the new data have come through the building of Mr. Strachey’s demonstration house, an account of which is included in the present volume.
Much helpful information is also likely to come to us from the Colonies, particularly from Rhodesia and British East Africa, where there is great activity in Pisé-building, and where there is no “close season” such as our winter imposes upon us here.
It is instructive also to note that great interest in Pisé-building has been aroused in Canada and in Scandinavia, the two countries that we were wont to associate particularly with timber-building.