Made a good internet find today. The reference book "Wood Handbook--Wood as an Engineering Material", by the US Forrest Service, is available on-line in its entirely, for free, as a bunch of PDF files. One file per chapter, looks like about 20 meg all told.
If you like hard copy, you can get what looks like a nicely bound printed version from Lee Valley (among other places).
BTW, this represents a continuing (and excellent) trend in goverment publications. Our tax dollars have already paid for the information contined in the book, so that information is available for free. For those of you who don't pay US income tax, it's a free gift from us to you and on behalf of my fellow taxpayers, please enjoy it with our compliments. If you want the value added of printing and binding, that's available too, but you have to pay for it. Seems like a perfect arrangement to me.