‘17th-Century Essex County Cupboard’ to Prepress

I uploaded the interior files to our printer on Tuesday for Peter Follansbee’s latest book, “17th-Century Essex County Cupboard” – so by the time you read this, I hope we’re finalizing the cover. This one is a tour de force – a twice-in-a-lifetime project (though I’ll bet Peter wouldn’t mind making it again) that we are honored to be preserving in this 200+ page book. Below is Christopher Schwarz’s foreword. (Barring delays, this book will likely be in house by the end of May.)

– Fitz

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I think it’s fair to say that Peter Follansbee doesn’t dabble in much. Sure, he builds some Windsor and ladderback chairs, he carves spoons and constructs the occasional Chinese firewood carrier.

But for most of Peter’s life, he has focused his research and woodworking on one thing: the furniture and workshop practice of 17th century New England. While our best furniture scholars dedicate themselves to the materials, provenance, culture and forms from a particular era, Peter went even further.

He trained to become a 17th-century joiner to understand how the tools were used, why pieces were made the way they were and how the dang things were put together. And that training began with help from scholars and woodworkers. It’s a good list: Jennie Alexander, author of “Make a Chair from a Tree,” Drew Langsner, founder of Country Workshops, and Robert F. Trent, then the curator at Winterthur Museum. They all helped train Peter’s mind, eye and hands.

But then Peter took a huge leap and became a full-time joiner at Plimoth Plantations (now Plimoth Patuxet Museums) in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

For 20 years, Peter built furniture there every day while exploring the tools, processes and furniture forms common to the period. He figured things out by doing the tasks of a 17th-century joiner day after day. The turning, the mortising, the tenoning, the unusual crease mouldings and the processing of green oak into beautiful riven boards.

It takes a deep knowledge of all these things to make furniture that looks and feels right when you encounter it in person. A joint stool made with home center oak and dowels just looks wrong. You have to go all the way and embrace the materials, tools and limitations of the 17th century woodworker.

Well, except for the clothes. Peter always seems to be wearing 20th century cargo shorts and tie-dyed shirts (we challenge you to count the total shown in these pages).

Of all the woodworkers I know, Peter comes closest to living the professional life of the joiners he studies. It’s not just his hobby. Since he left Plimoth in 2014, Peter has made a living making furniture in the 17th-century way. No machines. No power tools. And he does it in a small timber-frame shop behind his house. He makes a little money from teaching and writing. But making furniture is what puts food on his family’s table. He’s learned much more about the craft this way than someone who plays “historical re-enactor” in their shop on the weekends. Such as? Well, if you ask him a question about “How did they do this operation back in the day?” you’re likely to get the response “Everyone who knows is dead!”

But if you press him, he has some interesting ideas to share.

Which brings us to this book. When Peter began work in early 2021 on the two 17th-century Essex County cupboards shown in this text, he began documenting his work. Eventually, in September of that year, he approached us: Would we consider publishing a short book that captured his notes, drawings and processes concerning the cupboard?

I replied, “I definitely am game.”

That day, Peter wrote the first 2,000 words of this book and kept going until he turned in 40,000 words of text and 1,200 images in January 2025.

This is not a short book.

As we dug into the text, we realized that this book is about as close a description as we’ll ever get to how complex pieces of 17th-century furniture began in the forest and progressed through the workshop. This particular cupboard contains a multitude of operations: riving stock, insane amounts of tricky (and simple) joinery, drawboring, nailing, faceplate and spindle turning (some of it on a massive scale), plus sometimes-wild mitering jobs to add all the decoration to this enormous and beautiful piece.

Building a cupboard like this isn’t just figuring out the joinery. It’s also figuring out how the original makers may have held some of the odd-shaped bits to work on them. It’s puzzling over the order of operations to assemble the components. It’s figuring out when to carve and paint, when to rive and when to cut joints to keep the whole operation moving forward.

Even if you never plan to build this cupboard, you’ll find Peter’s book a gripping account of a twice-in-a-lifetime project. After reading the book’s final proof in March 2026, I was a bit awe-struck. Not just by Peter’s commitment to the time period and its forms, but also by the original joiners who made these pieces in early America.

It made my own work at the bench feel a bit small. But it also nudged me to be better. To get the details right. To chase after the materials used by the early woodworkers I study. And I hope you will find that the same inspiration as you read through Peter’s text.

It isn’t often that Lost Art Press gets to publish a book like this. Written by a joiner at the top of his game after a lifetime of research, training and daily work. Plus a project that is worthy of all the long years of toil it took Peter to be able to build it.

This is what furniture research should look like. And it’s what the best woodworking books should be like, too.

Christopher Schwarz
Publisher
March 17, 2026