Author Spotlight

Henry Petroski


Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. The author of a dozen previous books, he lives in Durham, North Carolina.

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The Essential Engineer
Written by Henry Petroski
Read by Mark Deakins

Unabridged Audiobook Download | pages | Random House Audio | Science - Applied Sciences
978-0-307-70732-1 (0-307-70732-6)

February 23, 2010 | $24.95



From the acclaimed author of The Pencil and To Engineer Is Human, The Essential Engineer is an eye-opening exploration of the ways in which science and engineering must work together to address our world’s most pressing issues, from dealing with climate change and the prevention of natural disasters to the development...

Also available as an eBook and a hardcover.

book cover
The Essential Engineer
Written by Henry Petroski

Hardcover | 288 pages | Knopf | Science - Applied Sciences
978-0-307-27245-4 (0-307-27245-1)

February 23, 2010 | $33.00

(Available February 23, 2010)


From the acclaimed author of The Pencil and To Engineer Is Human, The Essential Engineer is an eye-opening exploration of the ways in which science and engineering must work together to address our world’s most pressing issues, from dealing with climate change and the prevention of natural disasters to the development...

Also available as an unabridged audiobook download and an eBook.

book cover
The Essential Engineer
Written by Henry Petroski

eBook | 288 pages | Knopf | Science - Applied Sciences
978-0-307-59320-7 (0-307-59320-7)

February 23, 2010 | $33.00



From the acclaimed author of The Pencil and To Engineer Is Human, The Essential Engineer is an eye-opening exploration of the ways in which science and engineering must work together to address our world’s most pressing issues, from dealing with climate change and the prevention of natural disasters to the development...

Also available as an unabridged audiobook download and a hardcover.

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The Toothpick
Written by Henry Petroski

eBook | 464 pages | Vintage | Art - Design - Product; Technology - Inventions; Technology - Industrial Design
978-0-307-49200-5 (0-307-49200-1)

November 26, 2008 | $18.95



A celebration culture and technology, as seen through the history of the humble yet ubiquitous toothpick, from the best-selling author of The Pencil.

From ancient Rome, where emperor Nero made his entrance into a banquet hall with a silver toothpick in his mouth, to nineteenth-century Boston, where Charles Forster, the father of...

Also available as a hardcover and a trade paperback.

book cover
The Toothpick
Written by Henry Petroski

Trade Paperback | 464 pages | Vintage | Art - Design - Product; Technology - Inventions; Technology - Industrial Design
978-0-307-27943-9 (0-307-27943-X)

November 4, 2008 | $18.95



A celebration culture and technology, as seen through the history of the humble yet ubiquitous toothpick, from the best-selling author of The Pencil.

From ancient Rome, where emperor Nero made his entrance into a banquet hall with a silver toothpick in his mouth, to nineteenth-century Boston, where Charles Forster, the father of...

Also available as an eBook and a hardcover.

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Paperboy
Written by Henry Petroski

eBook | 384 pages | Vintage | Biography & Autobiography - Science & Technology
978-0-307-42720-5 (0-307-42720-X)

December 18, 2007 | $16.99



Henry petroski has been called “the poet laureate of technology.” He is one of the most eloquent and inquisitive science and engineering writers of our time, illuminating with new clarity such familiar objects as pencils, books, and bridges. In Paperboy, he turns his intellectual curiosity inward, on his own past.

Petroski grew...

Also available as a trade paperback.

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Pushing the Limits
Written by Henry Petroski

eBook | 304 pages | Vintage | Architecture - Public, Commercial, or Industrial Buildings; Architecture - History; Transportation
978-0-307-42736-6 (0-307-42736-6)

December 18, 2007 | $18.95



In the ever increasing push for longer bridges, taller buildings, bigger stadiums, and grander projects of all kinds, engineers face new challenges that redefine our sense of both aesthetics and functionality. Pushing the Limits describes two dozen adventures in engineering that provide a fresh look at the past, a unique view...

Also available as a trade paperback.

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Small Things Considered
Written by Henry Petroski

eBook | 304 pages | Vintage | Technology - Engineering - Mechanical
978-0-307-42780-9 (0-307-42780-3)

December 18, 2007 | $18.95



Henry Petroski, “America’s poet laureate of technology” (Kirkus Reviews)–author of The Pencil and The Evolution of Useful Things–now gives us an entertaining and perceptive study of design in everyday life, while revealing the checkered pasts, and some possible futures, of familiar objects.

Chairs, lightbulbs, cup holders, toothbrushes, doorknobs, light switches, potato peelers...

Also available as a trade paperback.

book cover
The Toothpick
Written by Henry Petroski

Hardcover | 464 pages | Knopf | History; Technology - Inventions; Technology - Industrial Design
978-0-307-26636-1 (0-307-26636-2)

October 16, 2007 | $35.95



Like The Pencil, Henry Petroski’s The Toothpick is a celebration of a humble yet elegant device. As old as mankind and as universal as eating, this useful and ubiquitous tool finally gets its due in this wide-ranging and compulsively readable book. Here is the unexpected story of the simplest of implements—whether...

Also available as an eBook and a trade paperback.

book cover
Pushing the Limits
Written by Henry Petroski

Trade Paperback | 304 pages | Vintage | Architecture - Public, Commercial, or Industrial Buildings; Architecture - History; Transportation
978-1-4000-3294-5 (1-4000-3294-6)

September 13, 2005 | $19.95



Here are two dozen tales in the grand adventure of engineering from the Henry Petroski, who has been called America’s poet laureate of technology. Pushing the Limits celebrates some of the largest things we have created–bridges, dams, buildings--and provides a startling new vision of engineering’s past, its present, and its future. Along...

Also available as an eBook.

book cover
Small Things Considered
Written by Henry Petroski

Trade Paperback | 304 pages | Vintage | Technology - Engineering - Mechanical
978-1-4000-3293-8 (1-4000-3293-8)

September 14, 2004 | $16.95



Why has the durable paper shopping bag been largely replaced by its flimsy plastic counterpart? What circuitous chain of improvements led to such innovations as the automobile cup holder and the swiveling vegetable peeler? With the same relentless curiosity and lucid, witty prose he brought to his earlier books, Henry Petroski...

Also available as an eBook.

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Paperboy
Written by Henry Petroski

Trade Paperback | 384 pages | Vintage | Biography & Autobiography - Science & Technology
978-0-375-71898-4 (0-375-71898-2)

April 8, 2003 | $21.00



Anyone wondering what sort of experience prepares one for a future as an engineer may be surprised to learn that it includes delivering newspapers. But as Henry Petroski recounts his youth in 1950s Queens, New York–a borough of handball games and inexplicably numbered streets–he winningly shows how his after-school job amounted...

Also available as an eBook.

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The Book on the Bookshelf
Written by Henry Petroski

Trade Paperback | 304 pages | Vintage | Literary Criticism & Collections - Books & Reading
978-0-375-70639-4 (0-375-70639-9)

September 12, 2000 | $21.00



From the author of the highly praised The Pencil and The Evolution of Useful Things comes another captivating history of the seemingly mundane: the book and its storage.

Most of us take for granted that our books are vertical on our shelves with the spines facing out, but Henry Petroski, inveterately curious...


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Remaking the World
Written by Henry Petroski

Trade Paperback | 256 pages | Vintage | Technology - Engineering; Science
978-0-375-70024-8 (0-375-70024-2)

December 29, 1998 | $18.95



Science/Engineering


"Petroski has an inquisitive mind, and he is a fine writer. . . . [He] takes us on a lively tour of engineers, their creations and their necessary turns of mind."   --Los Angeles Times

From the Ferris wheel to the integrated circuit, feats of engineering have changed our environment in countless ways...


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Engineers of Dreams
Written by Henry Petroski

Trade Paperback | 496 pages | Vintage | Science - Applied Sciences
978-0-679-76021-4 (0-679-76021-0)

October 29, 1996 | $22.95



Petroski reveals the science and engineering--not to mention the politics, egotism, and sheer magic--behind America's great bridges, particularly those constructed during the great bridge-building era starting in the 1870s and continuing through the 1930s. It is the story of the men and women who built the St. Louis, the George Washington...


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