While I assembled a Scottish-inspired stick chair this week, I struck one of the wedges at a bad angle. This caused half of the tenon to snap off. Worse, the damage occurred about 1/16” below the surface of the chair’s armbow. It left a giant crater that couldn’t be planed away.
The funny thing: I smiled after it happened.
After 17 years of building these stick chairs, I enjoy making an occasional repair. It’s an opportunity to think, mess around a little and maybe even make the problem worse. Here’s how I dealt with this torn tenon.
Two Options
When this has happened in the past, I have drilled out the entire top of the tenon with a Forstner bit, then filled the hole with one of the pieces of waste left from sawing the tenon flush. This works great if you can find the center of the tenon.
In this case, however, I decided to excavate only the torn section of the tenon with a chisel and a gouge. Then patch the half-circle with waste left over from sawing the tenon flush.
The How-to
The first step was to chop out the torn section of the tenon. I did most of the work with a 1/8” chisel and a gouge with a tight sweep. The goal was to get the bottom of the hole as flat as possible and to leave just a sliver of the original tenon on the walls. I also deepened the hole from 1/16” to 1/8” to give the patch some more wood to grab onto.
Then I took the broken waste tenon and sawed off the broken section. I clamped the waste in a handscrew and used a flush-cut saw to remove the torn section. This created a plug with a flat surface that would meet the flat bottom of the hole.
I put some hide glue in the hole and tapped the plug into the hole. It took about five good taps, but the plug seated flat and squeezed out a good bit of glue. The whole repair took about 30 minutes.
This portrait of Ezra from an 8th-century Bible may be one of the first illustrations of what we would recognise as a bookcase.
I suppose it was inevitable that bookcases would eventually be the subject of my attention as a woodworker. I’ve always been a voracious reader and my book buying habit was only reinforced by studying history at undergraduate and graduate level, habits which were amplified by my wife’s profession (she is a lecturer in history at the University of Northampton) and appetite for reading. When Dr Moss and I moved in together, one of our first acts was to buy seven Billy bookcases to house our combined literature and history library. At that time, I was setting up my first workshop having studied lutherie at the Totnes School of Guitarmaking, and furniture building seemed like a different world to building guitars. So, a trip to IKEA and carrying seven flatpack bookcases up the torturous steps to our house it was. Six of those Billies survived two house moves and eight years of constant overloading, but their days are numbered and I now make more furniture than I do guitars. It is time to replace the Billies and to liberate the several boxes of books that have languished for years on my study floor.
Why should any of this matter? Well, because for as long as I can remember, I’ve viewed bookcases as a storage solution for the question of “where do I put all these books?” But I’ve not stopped to think about the bookcases themselves all that much. That’s how most folk think about bookcases; even the librarians in charge of historic collections tend to look at the contents of the shelves instead of the casework. Book storage is largely ignored until you don’t have enough of it.
But when you look beyond the books, and start to tease of the “why” and the “how” of book storage, things get interesting. Chris first talked to me about his idea for “The Book Book” in the autumn of 2017, and I was hooked. Not only was this a chance to replace those Billies, but also to piece together why bookcases developed into the form we now recognise. That is a path we’ve been on in earnest for a year now, and it is a fascinating opportunity to jump down many rabbit holes and to ask questions that might seem obvious, but for which no easy answers are available.
Construction of the library at Christ Church, Oxford, spanned a period of 63 years.
One of the few books on this subject is “The Book on the Bookcase” by Henry Petroski – a fine book, but which focuses more on the “how” than the “why.” And the “why” is where the real action is. Book technology is a recognised field of historic research, but one that is concerned more with the making and use of books rather than how book storage developed, but it can tell inadvertently tell us plenty about the factors that shaped bookcase development. Bookcases have developed to house books, so understanding why books are the sizes and shapes they are, the customs of book usage, and value and importance placed on books, all tell us something about why bookcases developed how they did.
“Oh, that’s easy” you might think. The development of the Gutenberg press encouraged standardised paper sizes which then determined shelf spacing. Well, possibly, but why those sizes and height-to-width ratios? Book storage pre-dates the printing press by hundreds of years – as soon as the first book was created, storage space was needed. And so, “The Book Book” becomes a wonderful opportunity to challenge preconceptions about book usage and production. It is a winding path from a monk fraudulently putting his name to a book in the 8th century, through court rolls, the medieval practices of producing books by scribes (both professional and amateur), the development of the printing press and early modern book production, the unchaining of libraries in the 16th century, 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys, campaign furniture, Thomas Jefferson, William Morris, to Danish minimalism and beyond. And breathe. Do you want to know what the earliest documented instance of adjustable shelving in bookcases occurred? So do we.
Lincoln College, Oxford houses striking 18th-century bookcases.
When woodworkers ask me what sort of book “The Book Book” will be, the closest example I can think of is “Ingenious Mechanicks.” Like that book, we will present a rigorously researched history (in this case of the development of the bookcase) alongside practical woodwork. As well as combing through texts on book technology, and scouring art history for examples of bookcases (the earliest example I can find dates from the 8th century), I’ve been researching the furniture record. In particular, historic bookcases still in use at Oxford University, some of which are over 500 years old, and the Pepys Library at Cambridge University. Historic bookcases give us key information on three key questions – what book storage was needed at the time of construction, how the bookcases were constructed, and then how they have been altered while in use due to changing needs.
Chopping dados for a boarded bookcase.
We will also be building notable historic bookcases, and covering techniques and practical considerations for designing and building bookcases. All you need to know to build your own book storage; the information I wished I’d had when I stood at that IKEA checkout with my mountain of Billy bookcases eight years ago.
I’ll be blogging about the research process and the breadcrumbs we have discovered, both here and on overthewireless.com – I hope you will join us on this path.
After writing a few books, I figured how best to keep track of the hundreds of small details necessary to write a single chapter of a woodworking book.
This lesson came from failure. As all good lessons do.
When writing my first workbench book, I built all the projects, did all the research, then wrote the whole book in one go. The problem with that approach was that I had forgotten many details about the construction process because it the construction process had occurred two years earlier. So I had to basically rebuild the projects in SketchUp with the help of my step photos to prod my 2005 brain into answering questions posed by my 2007 brain.
For a later book, I wrote the chapters in real time as I built the projects. Every evening I wrote the text that described that day’s activities. This created scintillating, technical-manual-like reading – tab A into slot B. It was boring because I had no perspective on the project. My point of view was that of a diarist – not someone who was trying to explain what’s important to the reader. I didn’t yet fully know what was important. When you are in the moment, everything is important. And so my chapters were about three times too long.
With both approaches I had to rewrite vast swaths of text. I don’t mind doing that. But I’d get a book done faster if I could skip a rewrite.
I now use a third approach, and it works. I have a clipboard filled with all the construction drawings for each project in the book. Plus about 10 pages of blank paper. As I build, I write notes to myself.
“Legs ended up 2° off from the plan but look nice.”
“Saddle begins as 5/8″ deep after scorping and ended up at 3/4″ after the travisher.”
“Don’t forget to mention the trick about the medullary rays and the sticks.”
So when I write the chapter for that project, I have the plan I was supposed to follow in hand, plus my thought process for each day. Writing chapters with both kinds of information is a breeze.
Well, “breeze” is an optimistic word. More like “less of a fart.”
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.
For me, it is easier to launch a book-writing project than begin a big woodworking job. That’s because with a book, I can begin by writing a chapter at any point in the narrative.
That doesn’t work in woodworking. You shouldn’t build a dresser by first sanding and finishing all the rough lumber.
I’ve tried to start a book by writing chapter one several times. The swarf in the mutton tallow here is that by the time you write your final chapter, your book has wandered in a different (probably better) direction than your TOC. So you have to throw out the first few chapters and rewrite them.
Here’s how I do it now. I write a chapter somewhere in the middle of the book – one that I have a handle on. If it’s a woodworking book, maybe it’s the chapter on how the hardware is made, or the one that compares several historical workbench forms. It’s something that I know forward and backward and can knock out.
We ask our new authors to do this, too. This is for two reasons: One, it gives the authors confidence that they can write a book. That first chapter is a significant step.
Then we edit this sample chapter and give the author a list of ways to improve the writing. Some authors ignore the advice (which makes more work for me) and some take it to heart. They tape notes to their computers to remind them of their weaknesses.
Here are the most common problems. (If you want to improve your writing, buy a used copy of “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser. There are millions of extant copies. I sometimes buy a bunch at Half-price Books for $2 each and send them to authors who request help.)
Too wordy. Many people write like they talk. And they talk too much. After you write a paragraph, try to remove as many words as you can and not change the sentence’s meaning. Sometimes you can remove 25 percent.
Use active voice instead of passive. Most sentences should be: subject, verb, predicate. Example: John handplaned the cherry. A passive construction is: The cherry was handplaned by John. Passive voice is weak and wordy. (But sometimes you should throw in a passive sentence to break things up.)
Avoid -ly adverbs and -ing words. Most of them are stupid anyway. Banish the word “very” from your vocabulary.
Avoid semicolons. Most people have no idea how to use them.
Use the dash as little as you would use an exclamation mark. What comes after a dash should be something that you are shouting.
Three short sentences are better than one long-ass briar patch of mouth oatmeal.
Write a chapter, then leave it alone for eight weeks. Then edit it. You will be amazed at how you can improve your writing this way.
I could go on with this list for about nine weeks, like when I taught news writing classes at Ohio State and the University of Kentucky.
Bottom line: Write as if your audience is a bunch of 8th graders. If you can explain complex ideas to 8th graders, you have achieved something few writers do.
I haven’t decided where to begin with “The Stick Chair Book.” Perhaps the chapter on how to make stretchers. It’s shorter than other chapters about the seat, the legs and the arms. That’s because I don’t have as many tricks to make stretchers as I do for the other components.
Or perhaps I need to figure out some new stretcher tricks.
Let the self-doubt commence.
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.
Chester Cornett splitting out a log for a chair in Appalshop’s film “Hand Carved.”
Eastern Kentucky is the most beautiful part of the state – and the most poor. Ravaged first by the lumber industry and then coal mining, the land and its people are surprisingly resilient. When visitors come to Kentucky and want to understand the state, I drive them east into the mountains.
It’s also an area rich with a cultural heritage in art, music and furniture making. And for the last 50 years, Appalshop has been recording all aspects of the culture with fascinating short films.
During the pandemic, Appalshop has made all of its videos on its streaming platform free to rent. This is a remarkable chance to browse and watch the organization’s films from the 1970s to the present day.
You can see all the videos available here. To rent them for free, click the “apply promo code” link at checkout and enter: watchparty.
Of special interest to woodworkers: Watch “Hand Carved,” the fantastic film about chairmaker Chester Cornett. Also, check out “Chairmaker,” a film about Dewey Thompson and his rocking chairs. There are also films about quilting, bluegrass, coal mining, hip hop in the mountains, and civil rights.
If you find films you like, they are inexpensive to purchase, usually about $5. And it helps support a great organization.
