Lorena Owner-Built Stoves: A Construction Manual for Highly Efficient Low-Cost Stoves

Volunteers in Asia, Published 1979. Paperback, 96 pp.; 23 cm; second printing (October 1979, 3000 copies); illustrated with line drawings by the author and black-and-white photographs; cover graphic by Greg Shaw. In Good condition. Rust-brick illustrated paper covers show mild to moderate wear, with bumping to edges and corners, color loss along edges, and fading toward spine. Small nick at bottom edge of rear cover, light surface scratches at upper left. Perfect bound and tight. Foxing, soiling, and toning to block edges; pages mildly toned with occasional spotting, otherwise unmarked. Laid in is an original Volunteers in Asia promotional sheet on blue stock, folded once and printed both sides: one side "The Lorena Cookstove, a low-cost alternative in the fight against deforestation," which announces this manual as being prepared for distribution in late 1978; the other "Appropriate Technology Publications, Sept. 1979," listing the Appropriate Technology Sourcebook Volumes I and II, The Arusha Windmill, Appropriate Technology: Problems and Promises, and Where There Is No Doctor. First construction manual for the Lorena stove, a massive sand-and-clay cookstove developed by Ianto Evans at Estacion Experimental Choqui in highland Guatemala in 1976-77 and published at the height of concern over Third World firewood scarcity. Introductory Note by Erik Eckholm, Foreword by Ken Darrow. Covers soil selection, mixing and carving the lorena, dampers, chimney, cooking, and sample designs, with an appendix on rice hulls as fuel and a postscript assessing the stove's diffusion in Guatemala. The Lorena became the most widely disseminated improved-cookstove design of the appropriate technology movement, then was overturned by its own developers: testing at Aprovecho in 1989 found it consumed roughly three times the fuel of a carefully tended open fire, a result the organization credits with driving its turn to the rocket stove. Evans went on to found the Cob Cottage Company and co-author The Hand-Sculpted House and Rocket Mass Heaters. The 1981 successor edition adds Michael Boutette as co-author. …