Books of the Gutenberg projects library

You probably now the Gutenberg-Project, who provides copyright-free or copyright-freed books on the Internet for free downloading.

There you can find the Illustrated History of Furniture from Frederick Litchfield (1893) (already a little bit older). I recommend to download the HTML-format because of the embedded links to the relevant illustrations.

An other recommendation concerns a book from 1909f: Mission Furniture - How to make it from Henry H. Windsor, part 1, part 2 and part 3. He describes how to make different furniture. You can find a lawn swing, a billiard table and even a nice porch chair. One of my favorites (because it's sooo retro) is the settee on page 70f.