My wife is always bringing books for me from the used bookstore she manages. Yesterday she brought home “Barnacle Parp’s Chain Saw Guide” by Walter Hall (1977, 257 pages).

That’s like giving Col. Sanders a book on “How to Fry Chicken.” But never mind. Just because I own 10 chainsaws, at least half of which will reliably start, and have heated our house with firewood for 40 years, that does not mean I couldn’t pick up a few tips from a book like this.

After skimming for 10 minutes, though, I decided there was nothing in it for me to learn. Not that I couldn’t learn, but that I don’t want to. I’m too old.

I did get one tidbit from the book, though, a warning the author found in the owner’s manual for an imported (I’m guessing Japanese) chainsaw: “Attention! The use of chain saws may be riskful.”

I couldn’t agree more. If chainsaws weren’t just about the scariest thing in the world, there wouldn’t be nine sequels to 1974’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

Statistics show, however, that you are much safer operating a chainsaw than riding in a car (300 versus 40,000 deaths a year.) True, there are 36,000 emergency room visits a year from chainsaw injuries, but unless you happened to saw through, say, a femoral artery or your jugular, you’re probably just going to get a cool scar out of it.

The best way to avoid injury or death from using a chainsaw is to first ask yourself, “Am I a clumsy person, a person who is accident-prone, who pulls a groin muscle getting out of bed? Have I ever injured myself using tools more complicated than a screwdriver?”

If the answer is “YES!” then leave the chainsawyering to us competent amateurs and professionals.

Years ago a friend whom I shall call Chuck Parry, because that is his name, told me he was going to rent a chainsaw to do some cutting around his house. The next time I saw him, a hand and fingers were heavily bandaged. He had tried to move the chain along the bar with his bare hand and it slipped.

The most common cause of chainsaw injuries is “kickback,” a term we most often associate with crooked politicians and contactors, but in this case it refers to the tip of a running chainsaw contacting something and kicking back into the operator. To prevent kickback, always keep your second hand on the top handle of the saw.

One of the most dangerous situations in chainsawing is felling trees. About a hundred professional loggers and tree trimmers are killed annually from falling trees, and these are people who should know better.

My best advice to avoid being killed by the tree you are felling, in addition to clearing a path for you to run to safety, is to fall it where it wants to go. Sounds simple, and it is. Yes, you can pull a tree with a chain or cable, and you can hinge it one side or the other to get it to fall at a bit of an angle, but mostly the tree goes where gravity says.

Two autumns ago, when Grandson Bob and his best friend Dru first decided to build their log cabin up on the hill of the farm, they borrowed one of my chainsaws to begin cutting down trees. Bob thought if you cut a notch in one side of the trunk, that’s the way it will fall. He tried this on a 60-foot Norway spruce in a thicky forested stand.

I’ve never seen a chainsaw bar and chain so completely destroyed as these were, twisted and pinched tight in the backcut because the tree’s inclination was to lean the other way. Thankfully the tree was hung up and didn’t come all way down, or who knows what kind of explosive force might have been unleashed in what direction. It took Bob, me, a tractor, a long chain and two hours to get that tree off the stump without hurting ourselves. I named it The Sword of Damocles because we left it hanging up there, too dangerous to mess with further. Months later it came down by itself.

I think I’ll give Barnacle Parp’s book to Ron and Tom Miller, the loyal small-engine repair guys whose shop is upstream of us in Gas Valley, even though any details in it on chainsaw repair will mainly apply to 40-year-old chainsaws. (Of which I have three, come to think of it.)

Most things you need to know about the “riskful” art of chainsawyering trees you’ll find in online videos, but the best advice I can give is to get an oldtimer like me to work and learn alongside.

And for God’s sake, learn your trees.