author
A fascinating glimpse into America’s ready-cut house boom, this credited publisher was a North Tonawanda, New York lumber company that turned homebuilding plans into widely circulated catalogs. Its best-known book pages together practical floor plans, salesmanship, and early-20th-century ideas about affordable domestic life.
Ray H. Bennett Lumber Co., Inc. was not an individual author but a building-supply and ready-cut home company based in North Tonawanda, New York. Its publications were practical trade catalogs designed to help customers choose house plans, materials, and finishes, and they now double as rich historical records of American domestic architecture.
The company is especially associated with Bennett's Small House Catalog, 1920, a catalog preserved by Project Gutenberg and other library collections. That volume presents dozens of home designs along with illustrations and specifications, showing how the company marketed attractive, affordable houses to early-20th-century buyers.
Other surviving Bennett plan books and bargain books from the 1920s and 1930s suggest a long-running publishing program tied directly to the company’s homebuilding business. Today, these catalogs are valued less as conventional books than as lively documents of design, marketing, and everyday aspirations in the era of mail-order and ready-cut homes.