Books – Lynn R. Miller

All of Lynn Miller’s books are also available at Davila Art & Books.

BACK IN PRINT!

Horsedrawn Tillage Tools
Lynn R. Miller
©2020

This important book covers operation, care and repair of animal-powered cultivators, field cultivators, discs, harrows, ridge busters, listers and rollers as well as seedbed preparation and crop cultivation tools. It includes specifics on how animals are hitched and driven with these implements. The chapter on cultivation procedure covers a wide variety of field and row crop operations. The book also contains illustrated information on shovel and point types. Detailed engineer’s drawings of John Deere, Oliver, McCormick-Deering, Parlin-Orendorff, Avery and many other older manufacturers will be immensely helpful to folks restoring equipment. This cornerstone of the Work Horse Library has over 1,000 photos and illustrations covering the new and old, the useful and the historic.

Visit Davila Art & Books to see Horsedrawn Tillage Tools excerpts.

Brown Dwarf
Lynn R. Miller
©2020

Brown Dwarf is a semi-illustrated, quasi-scientific comedy of the arts that tells the tale of a small town beset by outside influencers involved in some seriously shady maneuverings. The primary setting is the high desert of central Oregon, with offshoots to Central America, New York City and beyond. The secondary setting is a sloshing of time frames and political urgencies. A next incarnation western novel, Brown Dwarf employs a complex, narrative amalgam to tell the story of Enno Duden, a young reluctant messiah, and his efforts to build a farm. Parallel storylines touch the Duden adventure: environmental espionage, comedy, geothermal intrigue, romance, appropriate weaponry, and art-world chicanery are a few of the elements. Side by side and sometimes overlapping the Duden story, there is a modern sculptor / old cowboy and his intrigue with an art dealer / gun runner, a ghost, a retired cow cop turned concierge vigilante, a jam-band drummer on the lam, a mercenary scientist, and a couple of brown dwarves. Concurrent regional sovereignty efforts punctuate the economics, politics and environmental concerns of the time. Scientific intrigues around failed stars and exotic energy sources inflate possibilities. Family arguments between the author and narrator serve to clarify and confuse at the same time, while at the core, mysterious cat and mouse escapades revolve around the oft-attempted eradication of the ‘messiah,’ Duden.

Visit Davila Art & Books to see Brown Dwarf excerpts.

The Glass Horse
Lynn R. Miller
©2008

review by Jeanne Rewaon

“I ran across a reference to this book online and was shocked to see a book that combined some of my interests that rarely seem to appear in new fiction. I did not expect to get a book of such rare quality! Look past the occasional typos and you’ll find a wonderfully written book. Perfect story-building keeps the suspense rolling at just the right pace, so that you aren’t lost at any point, nor is there a moment of boredom. The Glass Horse is full of unique but believable characters. I appreciated that no one character got significantly more weight than the others, and you get to spend time with each major character while they are alone, giving insight into each’s life, values, and perspective on the story. This book is incredibly witty without disregarding the seriousness of subjects such as environmental destruction, political corruption, neo-colonialism, and organized crime.

“Even though I am someone who rarely allows herself much time for fiction reading, I was ready to pick it up again as soon as I finished this brilliant book. I decided instead to start lending it to friends. I can’t recommend it highly enough!”

elastic signature: notes on painting
Lynn R. Miller
©2017

review by Paul Hunter

“Lynn Miller’s Elastic Signature is not an illustrated treatise on painting, nor a dissertation, much less a diatribe. It is a unique undertaking, private and personal, a meditation to accompany a miniature dance of process, of starting points and departures, a call and response in two disciplines that touches 40 years of the visual world seen and felt. This twofold book mingles drawings, paintings and images, with language, metaphors and words. The painter-writer offers a rare excursion that is both measured and abundant. The one art calls out to the other—paintings summon each other behind and ahead, as the calm yet definite voice conjures a thread of thought and feeling deftly and patiently set forth. The brush strokes work as another kind of writing, the reach and stretch of phrasing another kind of seeing, both in the service of a quiet, long-standing and substantial truth. The artist stands here amid his works, nodding to their diverse impulses and tangible achievements, emblems of an artful life. This compact, understated yet powerful book belongs in the hand and on the shelf of the lover of both painting and language, or else tucked into one’s travel kit. There is rare timing and music to Miller’s Elastic Signature, as well as affection and promise. The faith of its deeper rhythms like sounding whales break the surface when one least expects.”

Talking Man
Lynn R. Miller
©2017

review by Paul Hunter

“What is any fiction but a fig leaf, a way of telling a personal, deeply felt truth without resorting to the blush or handcuffs. Any mature artist looking back over his life knows how invested he is in the stories and turning points that got him here. Yet if he is honest, he might also look back in wonder at that naïve young spirit who took such chances, maybe risked his all on a throw of the dice. Lynn Miller’s Talking Man is a robust and lovely book about his artful young self in motion, in solution, that resists easy categories, that is most invested in the bite and bark of those truths that got him all this way and still abide. The reader might expect to be carried to those moments that set his own life on its path. Miller’s book is vital and precarious, a kunstroman in spades.”

Training Workhorses / Training Teamsters
Lynn R. Miller
©2018

The Second Edition, now in COLOR, covers such subjects as understanding horses; training horses to work in harness; correcting behavior problems with work horses; care and feeding of work horses; training tips for every age of horse, from imprinting newborn foals to starting older horses; harness and bits; harnessing; the dynamics of pulling; learning to drive horses and driving dynamics.

Horsedrawn Plows and plowing
Lynn R. Miller
©2018

With over 1,000 drawings and photos covering how to plow with horses using older equipment and new implements. Here you will find simple diagrams explaining tricky adjustments for both riding and walking plows. Detailed engineer’s drawings of John Deere, Oliver, McCormick Deering, Parlin and Orendorff, Avery, and many other older manufacturers will be immensely helpful to folks restoring equipment. Also includes closeup photos and information on new makes of animal-drawn plows including Pioneer and White Horse.

The Horsedrawn Mower Book
Lynn R. Miller
©2018

With hundreds of photos and drawings, the profusely illustrated text covers restoration, rebuilding, repair, and tune-up with a focus on the very popular McCormick Deering (International) No. 9. It also includes references to other makes and models as well as resource information for updating cutter bar assemblies to new materials and functions.

Art of Working Horses
Lynn R. Miller
©2016

review by Paul Hunter

“This book reaches beyond the teamster’s craft and skills, to touch deeper connections with the animals and teams that can make this work a calling, and its practice an art. Lynn Miller’s book is the culmination of a lifetime of writing to help inform teamsters and train their animals. It is a third companion volume to the author’s earlier Work Horse Handbook and Training Workhorses / Training Teamsters. With 481 color and black & white photographs alongside the author’s own paintings and drawings, it is a large, physically pleasing and substantial book, though its heart resides in the 365 pages of stories that stand as challenges to those who work with draft animals in any capacity. There is a wealth of practical information about harness adjustments, fitting collars, diet and hoof care, but the subtleties of the “art” come through the narratives that give us a look at strong and unforgettable characters and the horses they share the work with.”

Work Horse Handbook
Lynn R. Miller
©2015

excerpt: “Another exercise is to pull the left line slightly and let out an equal amount of right line – the animal should turn left. Then try a right turn. Now all this may seem too basic. The real test follows. Draw or scratch or otherwise mark two lines 30 inches apart and 30 feet long. Then in another area set 4 pylons 4 feet apart. Now ground drive the single horse “straight” down between the two lines and then weave the pylons (as illustrated), driving the animal exactly where you want to go. It will sound simple. It will BE difficult the first time. You will probably hold one or both of the lines too tight or too loose and the horse won’t go where you want to go. Don’t blame the horse; he’s only following your instruction (or making his judgment of a mass of confusing signals). If things don’t work right, stop and try to understand what you’re doing wrong. Practice ground driving until you at least have some measure of respect for what you don’t know and an appreciation for how much understanding the horse is capable of.”

Haying with Horses
Lynn R. Miller
©2000

Haying with Horses by Lynn R. Miller is THE definitive volume on, and an exhaustive manual of, how to make hay employing true horsepower with ground-drive implements. Includes procedures, operation and care of equipment, animal power concerns, and farming variables. This book is a mixture of old and new imagery and information. Over 1,000 illustrations. Haying with Horses is one volume of the Work Horse Library. Mr. Miller is also the author of Work Horse Handbook, Training Workhorses / Training Teamsters, Horsedrawn Plows and Plowing, The Horsedrawn Mower Book and many others. He is the founder and editor of Small Farmer’s Journal.

excerpt:

“Long after his physical capacities have dwindled to pain and stiffening, what drives the solitary old man to continue bringing in the handful of Guernsey cows to milk? To laboriously split the piles of perfect kindling and stack so meticulously in the perfect woodshed? To struggle with the anxious young horse in tedious repetitious harnessing? To calmly shoot dead the helpless suffering cow? To stoop and pick the wild flowers for his lonely breakfast table? To disassemble the hydraulic pump for the fourth time, carefully replacing the o-ring? To scratch with pencil stub at the scrap of paper, planning a new cross fence he may never be able to build?

“After all, this man does not worry about getting a piece of land to farm, he is beyond that. And this man does not worry about family as his wife is dead and gone and his children are far enough away in their own anxieties and longings to be disconnected. And he does not worry about learning how to farm, something that he absorbed in his dirt-fighting youth. Pulling a red hot chunk of steel from the forge fire, or pulling a struggling calf from its young mother’s uterus, or pulling hay from the mow, or pulling five dollars from his wallet, he doesn’t think much about making his farm pay, that’s behind him now. Eighty-five years old, he doesn’t think about not having a retirement account or health insurance. If he worries it is about his cows, who will care for them when he wakes up dead? If he worries it is about his land, who will know what to do with this fragile piece of the planet? If he worries it is about his tools and what they evidence. Who will know how to use the device he invented to pull stuck posts out of the ground? Who will know how to spin the drill press head before starting the motor? Who will forgive the old millstone its dips? Who will keep the wooden handles of his screwdrivers oiled? Who is there to honor the craftsmanship he cultivated for nearly a century? For the only honor craftsmanship can use is that which carries forward with the working.”

From humor-filled stories of a life of farming to incisive examinations of food safety, from magical moments of the re-enchantment of agriculture to the benches we would use for the sharpening of our tools, Farmer Pirates & Dancing Cows offers a full meal of thought and reflection.

Why Farm is a compilation of Lynn Miller’s earliest writings for Small Farmer’s Journal, advocating for small-scale farming, biodiversity and sustainability.

Lynn Miller has maintained dozens of journals which have been filled with hundreds of drawings and countless notations, many of which loosely fall into the category of poetry. Thought Small is a compilation of those journal entries.

sample page:

Starting Your Farm
Lynn R. Miller

This large illustrated book offers some uniquely modern and helpful information geared towards assisting people to “land” a new small farm operation of their own. Beginning with the “what fors” and “where fors,” and walking carefully through the pitfalls and challenges of the looking and buying process, this book could save the prospective farm buyer time, money and headache. 196 pages of thoughtful insight for folks trying to figure out how to proceed with their small farm dream.

Out of Print