I finally “met” Richard Jones. Richard and I have been emailing each other, at times daily, since we began turning his opus on timber technology into book form 11 months ago. Richard lives in Leeds, a city in West Yorkshire, England. I live 3,800 miles away, in Fort Thomas, KY. And last week, we spoke via Skype.
I needed to interview Richard for an author profile, and instead of chatting on the phone Richard suggested we Skype. While I would have preferred working through Richard’s life history while drinking a beer or two with him at his favorite pub, today’s technology did allow us to see each other as we spoke, despite the distance.
We talked about how he was born in Shropshire, on the Welsh border in the West Midlands of England, and grew up on a farm. We talked about how he was one of the few students who, in the early 1980s, applied and was accepted in the City & Guilds program in furniture making at Shrewsbury College of Arts and Technology, and how every Friday Robert Wearing would come in to teach – always with jigs. We talked about his work as a joiner and a furniture maker and a business owner and his time living in the U.S. and how it compares to living in the U.K., and his passion for rugby – both watching and playing. We talked for a long time and during that time I just kept thinking how lucky we are to have Richard in our circle of authors.
Richard is one of those rare individuals whose life has led him down varied paths and he’s managed – through hard work and talent – to excel in all of them. In a way, “Cut & Dried” reminds me of a roundabout, its contents sitting in the middle circle with Richard’s various roads leading to it. His approach to the technical and sometimes tedious world of timber technology allows for an accessible read, offering the basics, if that’s what you want, and the nitty gritty, if that’s what you want. And that accessibility stems from his life experiences, as a joiner, furniture maker, business owner, researcher, teacher and writer.
Today, Brendan Gaffney called me to say that the books had arrived at the storefront. I immediately drove over – with one of my children – to see it myself. I feel a bit guilty about this – Richard’s books are on their way to him, but one can’t Skype deliveries. Hopefully he’ll hold his life’s work soon.
It’s gorgeous.
While admiring the dust jacket Brendan told me to look underneath – I ran my hand across the heavy hardcover boards wrapped in grey cotton cloth, stamped with a die from a hand-printed woodcut. And I thought, “I can’t wait for Richard to see this.”
The book is now shipping, so to everyone who has already purchased their copy (thank you), it’s on its way. I’m certain it will be well-loved on many bookshelves and in many shops. For while Richard easily incorporates stories throughout to make the reading enjoyable, it’s also a reference book, one you’ll reach for again and again, thankful for an author who dedicated 10 years of his life to making a topic so complex less so.
Editor’s Note: In addition to making the last edits to the book, we’re working on some final approvals from museums, the index and the cover. We hope to offer pre-publication ordering in August.
Late into the nights and early in the mornings before my class at Port Townsend School of Woodworking last week, I was working through my review of “Hands Employed Aright: The Furniture Making of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847).” Until now, Fisher’s complete woodworking story has existed only in my mind. Because no furniture researcher has known of Fisher, the way all the tiny pieces and rabbit trails come together has never been put to paper.
I have, of course, several binders jammed with notes and papers and countless documents and images on my computer that contain all the little pieces I’ve gleaned on this journey. But it’s taken me years to put it all together into a coherent narrative. As I’ve made my way through this material, I’ve managed to clench it at the forefront of my memory but this story has been burning in me for years and so I couldn’t wait to see it in its final form.
When Kara sent me the PDF for author review, I was ecstatic. Reading the book in this final presentation (photos and all), it’s almost as if I was experiencing this story for the first time. I cannot express how delighted I am to be working with Lost Art Press on this book because there is no other publisher I would trust with this material. From the very beginning, Chris put his faith in me as a researcher and author, recommending minor editorial changes only for clarity. This freedom allowed me to dive deep in Fisher’s life and to present him in the way I think he deserves to be presented: in his unvarnished brilliance. My goal in this book was to allow Fisher’s life and work to emerge unfiltered.
Even though I’ve known the significance of the survival of his tools, furniture, house, and journal records for a long time now, seeing it all together in the book blew me away all over again. I’ve had the same conversation time after time with furniture researchers – when I tell them Fisher’s story, they all say, “Wait. How come no one has ever heard of this before?” This is a good question. A handful of Fisher biographies have been written but because each book had a different focus, his woodworking activity appears as little more than, “Oh. And he even made his own furniture! How neat!” Yet there in the Jonathan Fisher House and Farnsworth Art Museum archives sat one of the most complete survivals of a pre-industrial cabinet and chairmaker’s story unidentified and undisturbed.
When I was in Port Townsend last week, I spent a few evenings visiting with Jim Tolpin. As I told Jim of Fisher’s story, we discussed how not only is the completeness of the artifacts important, but the fact that it documents a rural craftsman’s work makes it particularly exceptional. Most furniture research focuses on the most successful and prolific master cabinetmakers in the big cities but not just because of a lack of interest in rural work. The tragic reality is that very few rural artisans documented their work and even fewer have two centuries of descendants that carefully preserved their artifacts. Their life’s legacy has long been discarded and their stories are gone forever.
Jonathan Fisher’s story is an incredible exception to this.
Reading through the book, I’m reminded of how spending this time with Fisher has profoundly changed me as a craftsman. Five years ago, when I began crawling under that furniture to read and understand his tool marks, my perspective on the way woodworking can shape our lives began to broaden. In Fisher, I saw a man that knew no boundaries. He made chairs, tables, chests, agricultural items, hats, picture frames, tools, paintings, and even his own wind-powered sawmill and workshop.
There are many questions about Fisher’s woodworking career I was able to resolve but many still remain. The one that nags me the most is, “What was it in Fisher that made him so boundless in his pursuits? What was it that gave him the confidence to pursue activities that were yet outside his skill set?” Throughout his whole life, Fisher continually explored new trades, in most of which he found success. Jonathan Fisher has inspired me to loosen the shackles of specialization that today’s consumer culture tries to bind us with. I do not believe we need experts to hand us pre-packaged products fit for immediate consumption because Fisher exemplifies a compelling alternative. Jonathan Fisher teaches us to boldly explore new craft vistas to build a life with our own two hands.
“As an instructional text, it probably has more process images than any other book on carving that I own,” O’Brien writes. ” … I can’t imagine more instructional detail being provided. If the book were composed of pictures alone, it would be worth the cost.”
O’Brien, a skilled carver himself (check out his letter carving here), writes that carving is one of the more elusive areas of the craft. “While it is disguised as woodworking, it really has more in common with drawing,” he says. “Realizing this took me a long time. The skills required for executing a carving with curves and flowing lines come from a different part of the brain than the skills we use for the predictable hard and straight lines of milling lumber and cutting joints. Think of the chisel as a drawing tool, not a cutting tool. Mary provides ample instruction on how to design, draw, and lay out the acanthus leaf and explains that this is important, not only for the task at hand, but also in order to develop our ability to see and execute fine details.”
O’Brien talks about the Eureka moment he had while reading Mary’s section on sharpening, the importance of storytelling when discussing technique (and how Mary’s memorable tales enhance the book) and, well, the fact that the book is a steal.
“The amount of time and labor evident in the making of this book belie the comparably low cost ($49 or less for the PDF version). It’s hard to imagine creating this much text and countless images in such a superbly designed, printed, and bound edition – in the United States no less!”
“Poets and painters have found in trees material for their art. If Gainsborough had been less successful as a portrait painter he would have given us some wonderful trees. As it is, in his few landscapes he has shown trees which are full of a kind of romantic vitality, springing full of life from the soil. Constable filled his great canvases with them, showing them in all their morning freshness as the kindliest feature of the English landscape. John Crome of Norwich painted trees with all the care which Gainsborough gave to portraits of fashionable ladies. In fact, his picture of the Poringland oak is a portrait. It shows all the physical details, the strength, stability and balance of the tree, and he has shown also its spiritual quality, something upstanding, fearless and ancient, which makes the bathers at the edge of the pool seem like mayflies of a day. It is just thise sense of reality, this glance at the transcience of human life, which the Frenchman, Corot, manages to evade. He found dreams among trees, but he casts a veil between himself and them as if he feared their strength, painting an ethereal beauty which had its roots in dream soil and not in the good earth.”
Editor’s Note: Richard Jones, the author of an upcoming book on timber technology, takes us back to the 1970s when he learned a valuable lesson in sharpening while in training.
A perennial subject in woodworking magazines and forums is that of sharpening techniques. No other furniture-making topic seems to generate so much tedious verbose nit-picking and circular bickering in woodworking forums, along with the publication of innumerable “sure-fire” and “infallible” methods in blogs, YouTube videos and magazine articles. For somer reason, most of these espoused methods for achieving a sharp edge on a tool seem to take an inordinate amount of time and require a large array of bits and bobs to do the job. I sometimes wonder if the process of sharpening is the main objective of the exercise for the people who describe them rather than the means to working wood effectively.
Naturally, the subject is of interest because blunt tools aren’t much use. Preamble to many of these articles often causes a wry smile for they bring back memories of my initiation into the “dark” art. Many authors make points about those who struggle at it and possess a workshop full of dull tools. Conversely, it is sometimes said that those who can do the job tend to be fanatical about grits, slurries and bevel angles.
My experience is that there are really only two types of people when it comes to sharpening:
• Those who can’t.
• Those who can.
In the first group, those who can’t, you’ll sometimes see every sharpening system known to man arrayed around their workshop gathering dust. They have fancy grinders, oilstones, water stones, ceramic stones, diamond stones, guides, pieces of sandpaper, jigs, etc. And yet, just about every edge tool they own is chipped, dull and mostly useless.
In the second group, those who can, I haven’t observed much fanaticism about slurries, grits and bevel angles. In all the workshops I’ve worked in the only concern is to get the job done. It’s a case of, “Plane’s blunt – better sharpen it.” Dig out the stone, sharpen the blade, shove it back in the plane and use it. The equipment is minimal: a grinder, a stone of some sort and lubricant, a few slips for gouges and the like, and, perhaps, a piece of oiled leather charged with a bit of fine-powered abrasive for final stropping.
Going back to the 1970s, when I trained, learning how to sharpen tools was undertaken within the first few days. I don’t now recall precisely the order of my instruction, but it went something like this: I was handed a plane by the cabinetmaker I was assigned to and told, “Get that piece o’ wood square.” I’d done a bit of woodworking at school so I had a vague idea of what to do. I fooled around with that lump of wood for 20 or so minutes and got it something like square – all this under the watchful eye of the crusty old guy and his ever-present roll-up hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
“OK, I’ve done that,” I said. “Now what do you want me to do?”
I was told to hang about for a minute whilst he picked up his square and straightedge and proceeded to scrutinise my handiwork. This was followed by a non-committal grunt and some desultory foot sweeping of the plentiful shavings on the floor – the wood was probably only about 90 percent or so of its original volume.
“Now sonny, let’s do the next job,” he announced. “Pull that jack plane ye’ve bin usin’ apairt and let’s have a look at the iron.”
I did.
“Hold the iron up so’s ye can see the cuttin’ edge,” he instructed. (He was a Scot.) Again, I did as I was told.
“Now, can ye see it? Can ye see the line-o’-light at the shairp end there?” He wheezed as he tapped a line of ash onto the floor and stood on it. He was referring to the shiny reflection visible when cutting edges are dull.
“Aye,” I said, after a little eye squinting and other pretence of intelligence.
“How shairp does it look to you boy?” he enquired.
I thought about this for a moment or two, seeking the right response to my tormentor – for I hadn’t really got a clue what he was talking about. I finally replied rather hopefully and a bit brightly: “Pretty shairp, I’d say.”
He laughed out loud, and hacked a bit. “Dinnae be the daft bloody laddie wi’ me son. If ye can see it, it’s blunt. I could ride that bloody iron yer holdin’ bare-arsed to London and back and no cut ma’sel’. Get o’er here an’ I’ll show ye something.”
You can probably guess. Out came the oilstone from his toolbox and quick as a flash the iron was whisking up and down the stone, flipped over, the wire edge removed, and finally it was stropped backwards and forwards on the calloused palm of his hand. You could shave with it. I know, because he demonstrated how sharp it was by slicing a few hairs off his forearm. On went the cap iron and the assembly was dropped back in the plane. This was followed by a bit of squinting along the sole from the front whilst the lever and knob were fiddled with and that was it. He took a few shavings off a piece of wood and it went back in his toolbox. It took, oh, a few minutes.
“Now son, that’s a shairp plane. It’s nae bloody use to me blunt. Ye may as well sling a soddin’ blunt yin in the bucket fer all the use it is to me,” he explained with great refinement. “I’ve plenty mair o’ them in that box, an’ they’re all blunt. Ah’ve bin savin’ ’em for ye. There’s a bunch a chisels, too. Let’s get ye started.”
For what felt like forever I sharpened his tools for the one and only time I was allowed to under his rheumy-eyed and critical stare, and things gradually got better. After a while he stopped telling me what a “completely daft stupit wee bastud” I was, and a bit later he started offering grudging approval. I had to sharpen some tools more than once because he kept on using and dulling them. When I’d done the lot we stopped and surveyed the day’s work.
“Aye, nae too bad fer a daft laddie’s fust effort,” he commented darkly, sucking hard on his smoke. “I think ye’ve goat whit it takes. Time’ll tell, sonnie. Remember, ye’ll never be a bloody cabinetmaker if ye cannae even shairpen yer frickin’ tools. Lesson over. Dinnae ferget it.”