Exekias’ signature (ΕΧΣΕΚΙΑΣ ΕΠΟΙΕΣΕ) as potter, rotated 90° anti-clockwise, detail from a scene representing Herakles and Geryon. Side A from an Attic black-figure amphora, ca. 550–540 BC.
I have often wondered what period of time must elapse before a good craftsman becomes an outstanding one. Was he born that way, needing only the requisite skill to develop his genius? Or did he evolve stage by stage like other men, but having the courage to take his work a stage further, perhaps many more stages than other men will venture.
Yet that may only imply the virtue of persistence, not that he is outstandingly gifted. What is the secret? We can add together the small perfections which make up the quality of a first-class man but, even so, something eludes us, something in the very essence of his work which defies analysis.
There is an old Breton proverb which says: “Qui aime son métier, son métier l’aime.” It may be this puts a finger right on the spot. That there has to be love between a man and his work, something which each gives to the other, which acts and interacts upon his skill before craftsmanship becomes the superlative thing that is created beauty.
Probably many more men than we can possibly estimate, working at the handicraft they enjoy, are producing work of this kind today, to be seen by few people, but to some of those few communicating that little thrill of pleasure which only superlative work can give. When we think of the amount of wastage there has always been right down through the ages by reason of material change and decay, the destructiveness of wars, accidents, sheer stupidity and thoughtlessness, the marvel is the amount of creative beauty which must have been produced by unknown men in every age for so much to have survived into our own, infinitesimal in comparison with what has been lost.
Furniture, of its nature, cannot date back many centuries, as much, perhaps more, through neglect due to changing fashion than from the perishability of wood. But ancient records and wall paintings have yielded up a great deal of information about the furnishing of kings’ palaces and the like, and many ancient craftsmen’s masterpiece has been described in meticulous detail, which still seems to retain the sense of wonder of those who had seen the work and the proud sense of possession of the monarch who had owned it. Very occasionally, by one of the freakish chances of history, the name of the craftsman will have survived while that of his noble patron is forgotten. A strange reversal in values.
In some cases, conscious that this work of his was good, the craftsman has inscribed his name on some obscure corner, to be discovered years afterwards by men who came to admire. It is not often the craftsman inscribes a friend’s name as well as his own, yet this is what happened when, between two to three thousand years ago, a Grecian artist wrote his signature in tiny, crabbed Greek script: “Exekias made it,” on the lovely vase he had made and painted, and then in a burst of pride and affection: “Handsome Onetorides.” And so the name of his handsome friend has been passed down through the ages in somewhat unsual confirmation of Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
Had the maker instinct of immortality when he inscribed his friend’s name on the lovely thing he had just completed? Exekias himself was known as the finest Athenian vase painter of his day, and the vase is the famous one painted with a panel in which with consummate skill he shows the two Homeric warriors, Ajax and Achilles, seated at an improvised table playing a dice game. The two figures, painted and incised in black upon a red ground, are bearded and every line of their bodies as they bend forward shows a kind of eager intensity, but there is nothing to suggest that the handsome Onetorides was a model for either. No, the inscription seems to have come out of the fullness of the artist’s creative joy, knowing this work of his hands to be good and wishing to associate with it the name of the friend he admired. Rarely has a dedication been made with such simplicty and rarely has any dedication lasted so long.
Probably when we come to the word “dedication” we come to the crux of the whole matter. The man who is going to do outstanding work in any craft has himself to be a dedicated man. He must be sensitive to beauty wherever he sees it and in whatever form and have the instinct to turn to beautiful accomplishment the handicraft he has made his own. He has to have skill so sure and informed that it will carry him faithfully through his undertakings, enabling him to tackle new kinds of work with the confidence of experience.
But all this the really good craftsman can have. If he wants to go further still, it can only be for the love of it, something which will bring an element into his work which no school can teach, a heightened degree of skill, a suavity, a finish, which can only happen when, as the Bretons say, the work loves him back.
Currier & Ives. Happy New Year. 1876. New York: Published by Currier & Ives. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002695831/.
“True taste is for ever growing, learning, reading—”
It is well-nigh impossible to begin a New Year without some stirring of the pulse. Anything may happen to us, for good or ill, during the coming year. There is a certain sense of adventure in the air until the year is well launched and the same old pattern begins to repeat itself and the same old routine threatens to submerge us. But need it? Sometimes I think that, in an age which is pre-eminently one of change and experiment, we are often very slow as individuals to become interested in either. Most of us at heart do not like change. What we most dread about war is the major uprooting it makes in our lives, and rightly we dread it, because that is the kind of change over which we have no control. But when it means setting ourselves against new ideas, new methods, simply because they are new, then we are in danger of closing our minds to much that is interesting and stimulating in the world to-day. And a very good resolution for many of us for the New Year might be to take down the shutters from our minds, the self-imposed iron curtain by which we try to shut out the changing world.
***
Behind it we accumulate a somewhat formless litter of preconceived ideas, cosily familiar tenets and shibboleths and judgments, acquired many of them during schooldays and early youth, which have become a great part of our mental make-up. As such they will limit and cramp us unless we are determined to keep our vision clear, our minds receptive, by deliberately looking out upon the world with the eyes of maturity, noting and comparing the new with the old, and prepared to find interest and pleasure in whatever is good in both. In this way we shall remain mentally alert, and in fair way to become men of trained judgment and good taste. Which, for the woodworker who wants to become a first-class craftsman, is essential. For it is the habit of really looking at things for their own sake with intelligent, seeing eyes, and a habit of comparing and contrasting, which teaches us the difference between mediocre and fine work wherever we may find it. And not only in furniture. We can draw inspiration from anything that man has made when the work is good.
***
The great difficulty is how to hold the balance between a readiness to seek out the best in what is new and yet not to be led astray by the vagaries of fashion. We all know how from time to time a change of fashion can inundate the furniture world, so that wherever we turn, in every shop window, our eyes are caught by a new style. Whatever our first reaction may be, the fact remains that when we have seen it sufficiently often our critical faculty becomes dulled. We find ourselves liking it simply because it has become familiar. “It grows on one,” we tell ourselves, and any plans we have for making furniture can be influenced for better or worse. How are we to learn to discriminate, to keep on the one hand an open mind that is prepared to learn, on the other hand not to be led away by every passing eccentricity?
***
I fancy that there are no easy rules. That the answer can only be found in that gradually maturing judgment which comes through continued, thoughtful, observation, a weighing-up of points which, as experience accumulates, becomes an instinctive habit of mind. Ruskin who, amid a welter of words, can be relied upon for flashes of golden insight, sums it up thus: “The temper by which right taste is formed is characteristically patient. It dwells upon what is submitted to it. It does not trample upon it, lest it should be pearls, even though it looks like husks. It is a good ground, soft, penetrable, retentive; it does not send up thorns of unkind thought, to choke the weak seed; it is hungry and thirsty too, and drinks all the dew that falls on it. It is an honest and good heart, that shows no too ready springing before the sun be up, but fails not afterwards; it is distrustful of itself, so as to be ready to believe and try all things, and yet so trustful of itself that it will neither quit what it has tried nor take anything without trying. And the pleasure which it has in things that it finds true and good is so great that it cannot possibly be led aside by any tricks of fashion, or diseases of vanity; it cannot be cramped in its conclusions by partialities and hypocrisies; its visions and its delights are too penetrating, too living, for any white-washed object or shallow fountain long to endure or supply.”
***
Life so lived ceases to be the drab kind of affair that subordination to routine would make of it. For there need be no subordination of the mind except to what is true and good. And a habit of constant, eager observation will show us that “every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest.” Once such a spirit is kindled within us life becomes something vital and glowing, full of new interests and potentialities. “True taste is for ever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, lamenting over itself and testing itself by the way that it fits things,” says Ruskin. “And it finds whereof to feed, and whereby to grow, in all things.” Which is a pretty heartening thought to take into the New Year.
Oct. 27, 1968: A few stars are showing. A light breeze coming up and 26°.
A day for small chores. I mixed up a batch of wood glue very thin and painted the runners on my sled. Tomorrow it will be ready to kick out the door. If I only had a pet caribou to pull it. Snow picking up – big flakes and lots of them.
“Dick’s lightweight sled is held together with 48 mortise-and-tenon joints, a few nails and his thin copper-coated electric fence wire. He put the sled to heavy use each winter, to haul firewood and occasionally meat from wildlife he found.”
This is an excerpt from “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke” by Monroe Robinson, which we are happily and fully immersed in right now. The italic portion is from Dick’s journals. The quoted portion is commentary from Monroe. — Kara Gebhart Uhl
Maurice Pommier, in his workshop. Photo by Brian Anderson.
[Editor’s note: We recently reached out for an interview with Maurice Pommier, author and illustrator of “Grandpa’s Workshop” (translated by Brian Anderson – you can read about Brian’s visit to see Maurice and his workshop in 2012 here). Maurice lives in Évreux, France, and speaks little English. But he responded, in the most generous way – an illustrated letter. Here are his words, as he wrote them without edits from us, along with a handful of illustrations, sketches and pictures to help paint a small picture of who Maurice is and some of the brilliant work he has done.]
I am not very able to speak of me. I am born in 1946.
My mother was dressmaker. She worked hard, early morning and late evening.
My father, alive but broken by the nazis.
We lived in a little village, Peyrat de Bellac. I go to school and after I was boarder at collège in the nearby town.
I thank life for having put in my company a lot of great people – I can not name them all. I choose three, the others do not be dissatisfied.
Tonton Dédé, the best, with working with tools and with his hands.
Pépé Léonard, the best storyteller. When he stop speaking, he was whistling.
Mémé Anna.
I think I’ve been drawing since I know how is made a pencil.
In 1968, I married Francine, she supports me since that date. We live in Évreux. We had three children and now four grandchildren; I worked at the Post Office for a long time. But I did not stop drawing.
Xavier Josset
My friend Xavier Josset has been presenting my first book to a publisher, me, I would have never been there.
After things changed, I left the Post Office, but I continued to draw and scribble. And write stories. In the following pages I enclose a small catalog of my bad habits. J’espère ne pas être ennuyeux.
“Moulin Richard de Bas, Ambert,” the oldest paper mill in France (watercolor)
“Rosace, tracé régulateur,” Cathédrale St Guy, Prague
François Calame, creator of Carpenters Without Borders, is a friend. I had the chance to make shavings and sawdust in his company.
The Tithe Barn of Daubeuf-la-Campagne (La grange aux dîmes de Daubeuf la Campagne)
Originally the barn was built with five bays. It was later extended to the south with five further bays. The barn is oriented north to south in its length. The drawing here shows the older part of the barn. The cross-frames, the main purlins and the bracing are shown, but for clarity, the rafters and the intermediate purlins are omitted. The doors, which have undergone several alterations over the course of the barnʼs history, have also been omitted.
La grange était constituée à son origine par 5 travées. Par la suite elle fut agrandie vers le sud, par 5 travées nouvelles. La construction est orientée nord/sud. Voici un petit schéma décrivant la charpente la plus ancienne. Il montre les travées, les fermes et le contreventement, pour plus de clarté, les chevrons n’ont pas été dessinés, ainsi qu’une partie des pannes. Les portes, modifiées ou crées au cours de son histoire, ne sont pas représentées non plus.
— “Daubeuf Workshop Diary,” p. 11, Carpenters Without Borders, (ink + sweat …)
“An Able Seaman” (pen + brush + ink)
illustration from “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, illustrated by Maurice Pommier, Ch. 41, (Hachette-Jeunesse, Paris, 2001) (watercolor + pen + ink)
illustration from “Le Sac Du Mousse” by Maurice Pommier, (La Martinière Groupe, Paris, 2004) (watercolor + pen + ink)
illustration from “Le Sac Du Mousse” by Maurice Pommier, (La Martinière Groupe, Paris, 2004) (watercolor + pen + ink)
Papercuts
“The Book of Tobit,” papercut (paper + X-Acto knife – “impossible to erase, no repentance …”
“St. Nicolas & Pierre le Noir,” papercut (paper + X-Acto knife)
“St. Nicolas & Pierre le Noir,” papercut (paper + X-Acto knife) “The genies of the fields and woods that accompanied St. Nicolas; as they were a source of disorder, the religious authorities forbade them.”
Tools & Wood
Simon (6 years old), my last grandson, says: “Pépé make me a crossbow!”
“My woodwork shop, it’s a mess! I know, it’s the same thing in my drawing workshop. But I love old tools. My friend Loïc says: ‘Maurice, to find room, you’ll have to push the walls!'”
My toolbox, less beautiful than Christopher’s.
Small model of a trestle born of my passion for roofing geometry – en français, “l’art du Trait.” One of the essential skills of the French carpenters.
Patrick Macaire
My current job, under Patrick’s direction. I met Patrick Macaire a few years ago and since, in my drawing workshop, there is a struggle for space between little pieces of wood and drawings.
P. 93
Gros plan sur le tracé de la saillie de l’arêtier en plan.
Gros plan sur le tracé de la queue de vache sur l’élévation de l’arêtier.
Tracés théoriques qui ne seront pas repris intégralement à l’épure (Theoretical plots that will not be fully included in the sketch)
P. 99
Jambe de force La jambe de force peut s’établir en prolongeant sa face inférieure jusqu’au lattis et en reportant son niveau sur la ferme de croupe et de l’arêtier; puis, en plan, en générant une sablière d’emprunt (au niveau de la ligne de trave) et en la faisant tourner à l’axe. Vérification en générant un faîtage d’emprunt au niveau de la dalle et en faisant tourner: les trois points doivent s’aligner.
We are finishing the Deuxième carnet – it’s been 7 years since we are working on these two notebooks.
For carpenters, the rabbit is the apprentice – he has big legs to run fast and big ears to hear everything.
He wasn’t
much into sports and instead spent his spare time painting, drawing and playing
music. He was content with Bs, spending less time on achieving perfect test
scores and more time on creating things of beauty. In high school he attended a
charter school with a focus on art. Half of his day was spent taking art classes
along with dance, music and theater.
“That
really was pretty formative for me,” he says. “It legitimized my interests.”
Although his parents were supportive, Joshua said many of his peers were more interested in sports – that is, until he was surrounded by likeminded peers at the charter school. That experience set up his life trajectory in a way, which has been, essentially, exploring different forms of art.
Joshua, as a child
Joshua
grew up in a typical Midwestern suburb and had a conventional upbringing.
“I don’t
say that disparagingly,” he says. “It was a blessing to us.”
Joshua’s
father worked for Pierce Manufacturing, building fire trucks. He started out in
the engineering department and later moved to sales. His mother stayed home to
care for Joshua and his two younger brothers. She did some babysitting as well.
Joshua’s
father was skilled at drawing, handy around the house and built the family some
furniture in his basement shop, but has never considered himself a
furnituremaker. Joshua remembers his father drawing for his engineering job in
the early years, and says that influenced his own interest in visual arts.
But kids
are kids, and following footsteps or building skills for work as an adult seems
unnecessary when adulthood feels like a lifetime away. “I was basically just a
snot-nosed kid who didn’t really have any interest in what my dad was building
in the basement,” Joshua says.
Throughout
high school Joshua played guitar in several bands.
“We were
terrible, of course, but that was pretty fun,” Joshua says. “I was pretty
faithful to that. We had multiple practices a week and we’d play shows and we
had merchandise and we’d do recordings, all that stuff. That was pretty fun to
do. I was pretty dedicated to the electric guitar all throughout high school.”
The genre?
“We actually played really loud, distorted, hardcore screaming music. So lots
of very aggressive-sounding music – there was thrashing – it was
pretty wild, pretty loud stuff.”
At 17,
still in high school, Joshua did a 180. “Basically I was very, very hardened
and very bitter toward Christianity,” he says. “It just seemed like a bunch of
hypocrisy to me, and I didn’t have any time for it. I was actually quite vocal
and aggressive in high school toward Christians.”
But Joshua
had a few Christian friends and he realized they didn’t fit the mold of who he
thought Christians were. In fact, he was impressed by them. And through
conversations with them, talking about the relevance of the Bible in this
century, he reconsidered.
“It pretty
dramatically changed my life,” he says. He stepped away from his “dark, dark,
dark music stuff,” he says. “It basically reoriented my whole framework of
life.”
So much so
that after high school, Joshua attended Calvary Chapel Bible College.
“I wanted
to have a firm spiritual foundation for my decision making, and if I got
married someday I wanted to have that firm foundation,” he says. “So I felt
like that was the first thing I needed to do, get established spiritually, and
then pursue career things.”
The best way Joshua can describe Calvary Chapel Bible College is as a Christian ashram. “It wasn’t a seminary, per se – I wasn’t getting rigorous academic theology study although there was definitely a lot of study of the Bible but it was sort of a personal growth kind of time.”
Julia
Joshua
studied there for a year. It was a two-year program, and he was taking it (and
paying for it) one semester at a time. There, he also met his wife. They fell
madly in love, he says, and made plans. But after two semesters of college, Joshua
was out of money.
“I needed
to make money to go forward with anything in my life,” he says. So he worked
for a year in the metal fabrication department of Pierce Manufacturing, where
his dad worked, to save up. Then, he and Julia got married.
“During
that year I was pursuing a lot of different options,” he says. “I wanted to
work with my hands and at the time I really loved music, and was very dedicated
to it. So, I thought, you know what would be really cool is if I could learn
how to make guitars or repair guitars. That would be the coolest job ever.”
On their
honeymoon Joshua and Julia went from Maine, where they got married, and drove
up through Canada to Minnesota. They found a place to live and Joshua enrolled
in a guitar program at a technical institute in Red Wing, Minnesota, where he
learned how to make and repair guitars.
“I basically think of that as my introduction to woodworking,” he says. “I learned how to do woodworking building guitars, highly precise, highly micro-scale kind of woodworking. And which is probably a good thing, because I was focused on a thousandth of an inch of adjustment. So that was good, but it didn’t quite suit me, it wasn’t quite the thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
While at
the tech school Joshua took a tour of the National Institute of Wood Finishing,
located on the campus of Dakota County Technical College in Rosemont, Minnesota.
Much of the focus was on furniture restoration and, as someone who thought
something from the 1950s was ancient, the work this school was doing on
antiques – on pieces built before the advent of power tools – blew
Joshua’s mind. He was hooked.
So after
one year in the guitar program, Joshua switched and studied furniture
restoration for a year at the National Institute of Wood Finishing.
Choosing Maine
By this
time Joshua and Julia had decided that they wanted to settle in Maine, which is
where Julia grew up. While dating, Joshua had met Julia’s family in Maine, who
lived on the Blue Hill peninsula, right below Bar Harbor on the coast.
“It’s
vacation land,” Joshua says. “Totally gorgeous. … This place has such an art
culture. It’s very rural and tucked away but so many really interesting people
either summer out here or they retire out here.”
The area
is also considered a hot spot for the back-to-the-land movement.
“Scott and
Helen Nearing, and Eliot Coleman and a lot of other people, real foundational
people, this is their neighborhood,” Joshua says.
This community’s
strong local farming and homesteading culture appealed to Joshua. There are also
a lot of antiques in Maine, and so Joshua’s change in study made a lot of sense
for a lot of reasons, he says. He had a viable career option in sight.
But before
moving to Maine, Joshua landed what he thought might be his dream job in
Nashville, Tennessee – he was hired in the finishing department of a small
custom guitar shop. It was a short stint.
“Basically,
we tried it,” he says. “It wasn’t a great fit. It was interesting, but it
wasn’t for me.”
By this
time Julia was pregnant with their first son. “Let’s just go home,” Joshua
says. So in 2009 Joshua secured a job in a cabinetmaking shop and three days
prior to their move, as he was loaded up their U-Haul, he got a call. The shop
had a huge job that fell through and they lost six months of work. They
couldn’t hire him.
Upon their
arrival in Maine, Joshua was hired by his father-in-law, a carpenter, just so
he could pay some bills. Although stressful at times, the experience of trying
to put pieces together and simply figure it out ended up being great, he says.
“When you’re self-employed you have freedom,” he says.
restoration work
So in
addition to working alongside his father-in-law, Joshua says he also was able
to start building some furniture and restoring antiques. And then, after working
for his father-in-law for a year and a half, Joshua hung out his shingle and opened
up his own shop.
“Instantly
I was booked up,” he says.
He told
his father-in-law he was going to take some time off, just to further establish
his own business and work through his initial job orders. “But I never worked
for him again,” Joshua says.
The ease
of getting customers surprised Joshua. “It caught me off guard,” he says.
“Basically, I showed up at the right time that there was a gap. There was no
one around that was doing this type of work for at least a decade. So, there
was this backlog of work that needed to be done.”
Also,
because the Blue Hill peninsula was an established vacation destination at the
time, many of the summer homes which were being bought up were filled with
antiques that needed work. Word of mouth spread quickly in the small, rural
area. Still, Joshua placed a small black-and-white ad in the local newspaper,
just to feel legitimate, he says. And it did make him feel more legitimate,
even when clients were approaching him on referral.
Laying Down Roots
Joshua and
Julia were renting a small house when Joshua, with a stack of woodworking books
and a desire to be part of the back-to-land movement, built his first piece of
furniture. His workshop was a tiny garden shed out back, which also held things
like their lawnmower. He made a small, painted, two-board top pine table with
tapered legs.
At the guitar-making
school, Joshua had been taught how to do highly precise and mechanized work. He
had learned how to sharpen hand tools for very precise tasks. Because the
entire school’s curriculum centered on guitars, the process of how to get
boards out of rough stock and turn them into a finished piece of furniture had
not been discussed. Rather the school’s teachers focused on complex router jigs
and technical mechanical operations.
“It didn’t
really fulfill me, for what I was after,” Joshua says.
Joshua loved
seeing tool marks on furniture and every time he did, it reiterated his desire
for a different type of work.
Once he
began taking his own clients in Maine, most of whom contacted him for
restoration work, Joshua filled his free time with learning how to build
furniture and tools using pre-industrial methods. He owned a few power tools
– a table saw, drill press, router and band saw. He knew how to sharpen
hand tools, and the basics of using them. But what he really wanted to do was
work with a rough board all the way through a completed project using hand
tools only.
Eventually
he rented a shop from Julia’s grandmother, a small carriage shed, 14’ x 17’,
located next to a stream. In it he kept a workbench, a tool chest and the
object he was working on. There was a large picture window with old wavy glass
with a view of a massive multi-family garden. “It was quite an inspiring
setting,” Joshua says.
Joshua and
Julia bought the property they live on today, 11 acres on a dead-end road, seven
years ago. They bought the house and land from old friends who were doing
homesteading and had been working on the house for 10 years. “Basically, we
bought into their progress,” Joshua says. “We jumped in where they left off.”
But Joshua
and Julia’s vision when buying the land was to eventually build their own
house. “We wanted a handmade house,” Joshua says. “We ultimately decided,
because of our love for history, that we wanted to restore an old house.”
So about
three years ago they bought an 1810 Cape Cod a half hour away. The house had
fallen into disrepair and was going to be bulldozed. “It had a gorgeous mantel,
all the original moulding, there was no plumbing in the house, very minimal
electricity – it was basically untouched,” Joshua says. “It was such a
beautiful thing it would be a tragedy to see it go. So it was perfect for us.”
They spent
an entire summer documenting and dismantling and labeling every board, every
joint, everything. They took the entire house apart and put it in storage, and
are now making plans to perform a massive restoration on it, on their current
property, in the next few years.
The land
Joshua lives on has a small pond with a stream at the back of the property, and
it’s mostly wooded with a few small fields – basically, it has a little
bit of everything.
“The major
selling point for us was that the way the property is situated there is a
perfect area for a workshop right at the road that is separate from the house,”
Joshua says.
This
allows Joshua to work from home, while still keeping home and work separate.
Because Joshua and Julia are active in homeschool and homesteading, Joshua says
their yard and driveway are filled with kids (they have three sons) and
chickens, and is simply not suitable for customer traffic. But with this
separation he can still hear his son practice his trumpet and yet, when
customers visit his shop, Joshua and Julia’s house is out of view.
Joshua’s workshop
Joshua’s workshop
Joshua’s shop is an old 24’ x 26’ 1-1/2 story house frame that was built around 1790 in Vermont. He found a company that dismantled old homes and restored them – they had done that to this one and, after seeing it on their website, Joshua thought it would be perfect for his shop. So he bought it and the company brought it to his property, where there was a raising that lasted an entire week. The company put the boards on the rafters, shook hands and then left. Joshua and Mike Updegraff – Joshua’s co-worker an editorial assistant at Mortise & Tenon magazine have been working on it ever since.
The Birth of Mortise & Tenon Magazine
Joshua founded Mortise & Tenon magazine in 2015. The inspiration came from spending every day in his conservation studio taking apart antiques to repair them and putting them back together again. Joshua found himself filing all this information he learned about the process away, simply because it differed so drastically from his work at the guitar-making school.
“It broke
all of the conventional dogma that ‘good work looks like this’ or ‘don’t ever
do that’ – all those rules that existed for the last 200 years,” he says.
“And so I got really interested.”
At the
same time Joshua was learning how to use hand tools.
“And I
heard a lot of people telling me that hand tools are slow, and that it’s a
romantic way to do it but it’s really not practical,” he says. “But then when I
looked at the furniture it actually looked like it was done very fast. The tool
marks were actually quite interesting looking.”
In addition, Joshua was reading journals of journeymen who detailed what they charged for the time they spent working and the time they took on various tasks was so fast. Something didn’t add up. Modern woodworkers were insisting hand tools were slow, but records from the past proved otherwise. Why?
M&T grew out of an old blog that Joshua was writing exploring this
question. “It was a personal blog, about my life and gardening, but it also had
a lot of shop stuff,” he says.
But Joshua
was growing tired of his blog. He wanted something that would be around for a
while, something crisp. He considered making a print version of his blog but
then he wanted contributors to share what they were learning. What would that
be? he thought. He realized, laughing, that what he was dreaming up already existed
– it’s a magazine.
So then he
shared his idea with a bunch of people. “They all said I was insane,” Joshua
says, “and that I shouldn’t do it because ‘print is dead’ and ‘there is no market
for that kind of thing.’”
Chris
Schwarz was one of the people Joshua consulted with “and he probably wouldn’t
say he told me I shouldn’t do it but he did warn me,” Joshua says. “And so
everybody else is saying, ‘Yeah – that would be cool if it would work but
I don’t think the market is going to support that.’”
Joshua
took all this information and advice and ignored it. He got printing quotes for
100 copies. “I wanted to figure out the smallest print run I could possible do,
and how much it would cost,” he says.
Why move
forward despite the well-intentioned advice not to? “I just really believed in
it,” he says. But he wasn’t willing to take a financial risk for his family. He
has no trust fund, no investors. “I was just this dumb poor kid that wanted to
start this thing,” he says. “So how was I going to do that? How was I going to
make this thing sustainable right out of the gate?”
Print
proved impossibly expensive but then Joshua realized that if he is going to
sell a magazine dedicated to hand tools, he was probably going to have to
connect with people outside of Blue Hill.
“So I got
one of those newfangled smart phone things and did some social media stuff,
trying to connect with people,” he says. “I remember getting on the Internet
and searching, ‘How to use Instagram.’”
He learned
and through Instagram and Facebook he really began connecting with people.
Eventually he shared his vision for the magazine and took pre-orders six months
in advance for Issue No. 1. This direct sales to customers helped him gauge the
print run. “That’s how I felt confident that it wouldn’t sink my family and I
thought, ‘Well, I got to try it.’”
Joshua
describes it as the magazine he’s always wanted to read. There’s no advertising
in it. It reads like a journal. It’s hefty. There’s beautiful photography and
solid research – both in and out of the shop.
The first
print run, gauged on the initial pre-orders, was 5,000. Joshua assumed this
would give him enough copies to also sell back issues over the next few years.
And while the size of the print run compared to pre-orders didn’t provide him a
massive profit, it did allow him to pay the bill.
But there were no back issues to sell. To fulfill the orders Joshua and friends wrapped each issue, along with a wood shaving, in brown paper sealed with wax. As they fulfilled orders, images of the magazine began appearing on Instagram. Interest grew quickly and he sold out before they finished shipping.
Today
Joshua’s print runs are 10,000 and the magazine is published two times a year.
Fulfillment still works the same way (brown paper, wax etc.). To get it done
Joshua throws a big party for about 30 friends and family. Over a Friday and Saturday
they help him with fulfillment, and he and Julia feeds them. On Monday morning
Joshua fills a U-Haul with all the magazines and drives them to his local post
office.
“The heart
of it for us is, and so much of the goal of Mortise
& Tenon is celebrating the joy in manual labor,” Joshua says. “So for us, this is just like that. We’re all
standing side by side, shoulder to shoulder, wrapping magazines. It’s
relatively mindless work so we’re just talking, having amazing conversations
for two days straight and gorging ourselves on great food and we’re just having
such a blast.”
Inevitably,
fulfillment will someday have to change. Joshua says he knows that and already there
are ways he could it do it more easily and more cheaply, but right now, he
says, it’s just too fun.
“I was not
trained as a historian,” he says. “I went to a trade school. It was very hard for
me, very hard to do this kind of work. Because every single sentence in that
book could be wrong. I think it’s a lot easier in books that say, ‘This is how
I do it in my shop,’ because I’m right. But with that book every sentence could
be wrong or not have the right nuance to be accurate. So it was really honestly
grueling, it was really hard work, but I was obsessed for five years. My wife
is so pleased this book is done because I was just immersed in it.”
Joshua was
so focused on the book that by the time it published, he needed time away from
it. So he poured himself into M&T.
Only now is he willing to look at his book again, an act he finds interesting
as he now has a different perspective on it.
“I don’t
have regrets with the book at all,” he says. He’s also beginning to realize how
deeply his research for this book shaped his thinking about woodworking. “It
completely transformed my whole thought process, the questions I’m asking about
historic work, my aspirations with what I want to do with woodworking in my
life, and it totally changed my trajectory, forever I think.”
As a
merger of historic research and hands-on woodwork, M&T has been the perfect outlet for him to explore this new way
of working. Joshua and Mike now spend about half their time in the shop and the
other half writing and editing articles, and doing graphic design work. The two
met in a homeschool co-op. Mike had been woodworking for 10 years and was
looking for a change. At that time Issue No. 1 of M&T had taken off, and was completely consuming Joshua’s life.
He was working 90 hours a week on M&T
but also had a backlog of furniture projects he needed to finish. So Joshua
asked Mike for help in the shop, repairing furniture. Mike started part-time,
pretty quickly moving to full-time. And pretty soon after that, Joshua said he
needed help on the magazine full-time.
“He’s
super skilled, super talented and so basically he was able to jump right into Mortise & Tenon,” Joshua says. Now
the workload is split 50-50 between the two of them – they do everything
together.
The two
also have additional freelance help, including Jim McConnell (content editor),
Megan Fitzpatrick (content and copy editor) and Grace Cox (customer service,
shipping and administration).
These days
Joshua is also dabbling in instructional videos and some other book ideas, but M&T is his primary, long-term project.
He no longer does furniture conservation – the last project he worked on
was more than two years ago. “Not because I dislike it,” Joshua says. “I love
it. There are just so many hours in a day, in a week, and I want to be
available to my family some. So I cut it off.”
Building
is still deeply important to Joshua. He’s structured his business so that half
of his year is spent building things. Of course, the last two years have been
spent building the shop itself – doing trim, window glazing etc. Joshua
calculates they have about six more months of work on the shop, and then he’ll have
more time to explore, research and build.
“Furniture projects primarily for me are the exploration of the process, not about getting more furniture,” he says. “I have a bunch of antiques and I have a bunch of stuff I made and I don’t have room for any more furniture.”
Joshua examining a table
research and examination
These days
he makes furniture and simply passes it off to other people. He’ll occasionally
take commissions but usually only exact replicas so that he can also take the
time to research it, learn about it and report on it. “My primary goal is
research,” he says. “I love learning about things and then teaching about it.”
Cultivating Reverence
Joshua
describes himself as a very independent person. “I’m homeschool, homestead,
home business,” he says. “I guess I’m just wired that way.”
At school,
he struggled with assignments not chosen by him that had to be done a certain
way and had to be turned in at a certain time. But if it’s a project of his
choosing he pursues it passionately, becoming obsessed (his word) and unable to
stop researching it.
It’s
similar to the relationship he’s had with theology. For many years, after
school, he got very deep into theological research (particularly in the Reformed
tradition) and, to some degree, he still is, he says. But that same deep
research now also applies to woodworking.
“I like
researching and asking questions and discovering,” he says. “I think doing
woodworking research at the bench is, frankly, the better way to do it.”
The years
Joshua has spent researching both theology and woodworking intersect on the
subject of work – its value and what the Bible says about it – and he
has spent a year and a half focused on that.
Joshua’s
spiritual life and interests, and professional life and interests, are all
connected right now.
“Working with your hands and how that relates to the head, heart and hand thing – it’s all intertwined,” he says. “And that’s what I learned from Fisher, you can’t really compartmentalize it. That’s part of what I learned from Fisher is to try and say so-and-so was just a woodworker or to try to define their identity in just one aspect just oversimplifies it.”
Joshua working his land with a scythe
Joshua gets up at 5 a.m. and does an hour to an hour-and-a-half of research, reading and studying. He then spends the first two hours of his day doing farm work. He and Julia have goats that they milk, chickens that they raise for meat and for laying eggs, and they’re expanding their vegetable garden. He arrives at his shop at 9 a.m., joining Mike who is typically already there. Then it simply depends on what’s needed to be done. Maybe it’s editing manuscripts or shooting the next cover for the magazine or building something.
Mike (left) and Joshua weaving cattail seats
“I think
it would be fair to describe the work as always different,” he says. “Mike and
I work as a team with whatever is going on so there might be a situation where
we’re working in the shop and we hear my son’s trumpet through the woods and
then all of a sudden the goats start screaming through the woods and one of
them jumps the fence and gets electrified and they all run down into the woods
and you have to go catch them and bring them back in. It’s honestly like a
circus around here. A typical work day has nothing typical.”
Mike heads
home around 4 p.m. and from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Joshua typically works through
email and begins thinking about the next day’s tasks. He leaves the shop around
5:30 p.m. and is then home with the kids. He doesn’t work on Saturdays and
Sundays.
Evenings
are family centered. Joshua hangs out with the boys while Julia makes dinner,
and because his children are young, he often fixes something in the house that
had been broken during the day. He reads before bed.
Joshua and two of his children
The youngest of Joshua’s three sons is 2 but still, the boys have a workbench in the house, with rasps, spokeshaves and handplanes. Joshua says he regularly finds little piles of shavings around the bench.
Joshua’s family
“I moved
out to rural Maine because I wanted to be with my family,” Joshua says. “We
started the whole thing by asking ourselves, What kind of life do we want to
have? What do we want to do day in and day out? How do we want to raise our
kids? What will life be like when the kids move out? And this is the kind of
life we want – connected to nature, connected to farming, connected to
handwork. And so we have the business stuff, Julia has her piano stuff [she
teaches], I have Mortise & Tenon,
so there’s a lot going on. But we always come back to: What kind of life do you
want to live? Do we always want to be out in life chasing things? Do we want to
push M&T and try to get it to
grow, grow, grow? But it’s about satisfaction and family and raising our kids.”
And in 10
years?
“I just
want to milk my goats,” he says.
Joshua and
Mike have been asking some hard questions lately. Mortise & Tenon is going all the time. Take the packing
parties, for example. With growth, they simply aren’t sustainable. And Joshua
finds that distressing.
“I don’t
have visions of conquering the woodworking world,” he says. “I just want to
make my own magazine and have my garden. I’m not resisting success but I don’t
do any advertising, I’m not a salesman, I don’t try to push it. It’s just the
natural growth of it. I just want a quiet life in rural Maine. That’s my goal.”
Joshua
talks about Patagonia, and how they only grow 1 percent a year. He talks about
strong growth rather than fast growth and how he wants M&T to still be around in 75 years.
“It really
changes the way you think about your work,” he says.
At the
time of our interview Joshua was re-reading “A Handmade Life: In Search of
Simplicity” by William Coperthwaite as part of his more-recent deep immersion
into the intersection of modern technology and society. In the book
Coperthwaite doesn’t preach anti-technology but rather focuses on humane
technology, technology that’s good for us.
And that’s
what Joshua has been diving into – the relationship of working with one’s
hands, modernization, machines and smart phones. While he says he’s been
sharing some of that in his publishing, he sees this as becoming a strong
message or theme in M&T.
Joshua,
though, is human. Self-sufficiency is a myth, he says. With farming, they do it
because they love it and they simply grow enough to keep them happy. With three
young children, teaching them to be helpful on the land takes time and,
honestly, distracts from productivity. So Joshua isn’t uptight or rigorous
about living off the land. Rather, the family simply does what it can, focusing
on what brings them joy. They hope to take their hobby and let it grow, knowing
that they’ll have more help from their children in the future.
In the meantime, Joshua and Mike continue to work on Mortise & Tenon magazine being mindful of their purpose statement, which speaks not only to the publication, but both their lives: Mortise & Tenon exists to cultivate reverence for the dignity of humanity and the natural world through the celebration of handcraft. You can read a detailed blog post about this here.
After talking about beauty for a bit, Joshua talks about Proverbs 27, which Fisher mentioned a lot in his journals: “You do not know what a day will bring.” In addition to this bit of inspiration, Joshua lives by his purpose statement, trying each day to “cultivate reverence for the dignity of humanity and the natural world” through handcraft, his farm, the soil, being at home with his family, loving his kids, attending church, worshiping, singing and reading the Bible. … I’m just on a journey, trying to keep my head on straight, doing what I love and trying to make sense of it along the way.”