With “Campaign Furniture” now at the printer, John Hoffman and I had a chance to catch our breath this month before we launch into another busy season of product development, including Peter Galbert’s chairmaking book.
After taking inventory, we have 64 deluxe versions of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” I know we will sell them all, especially when the second book on furniture comes out. So this isn’t some crass ploy. If we were unscrupulous, we’d just sell them on eBay when the second book came out.
This entry is, instead, about me making peace with the project. A project of this scale will make you hate the project on an equivalent scale. That happens when making furniture or books.
Lately, I’ve been taking my deluxe book down to the shop to read it. The workbench is the best place to do that because the book is so huge. (I really need to build a bookstand for my personal copy this year, though the binding is incredibly tough and flexible.)
As I’ve been reading this book with fresh eyes, I have concluded that it is mistitled. It’s not about marquetry – that’s only a small part of it. It’s about seeing your own work through 18th-century eyes. Just like our century, the 18th century was filled with craftsmen who did shoddy work, stuff that was glued together without real joinery or regard for wood movement.
The fight, according to Roubo, is to be the better craftsman. To do the good work even if it does not pay. To refuse to sink to the level of the furniture-selling middleman, or the customer who values price over everything else.
If you take this high road, you’ll take your lumps. Roubo did. But your furniture won’t fall apart when the humidity or the whims of style change.
And maybe, avec bon chance, you will make something that endures like “l’Art du menuisier.”
That’s where Roubo thinks woodworkers belong. In a footnote at the conclusion of his second section of the Third Volume of “l’Art du menuisier,” during which he describes the processes of making furniture from solid wood, he waxes enthusiastically eloquent on the world of the woodworker, and the remarkable people who populate it.
Give yourselves a pat on the back, courtesy of André-Jacob Roubo.
“…(T)he art of woodworking is, without question, the most extensive of the mechanical arts, as much for the different types of woodworking as for the multitude of works belonging to each type of carpentry, which requires a quantity of knowledge distinct one from the other. Such that the art of woodworking can and should even be regarded as six arts under the same name, but all different from each other. Namely, the art of building carpentry, which is quite considerable, the art of carriage woodworking; the art of furniture making, which is separated in two distinct classes one from the other, the art of cabinetry, which embraces not only the knowledge of choice and use of wood, but also that of different metals and other substances both mineral and vegetable, and the use even of turning and filing; the art of trelliswork or Garden woodworking, which is still another class apart, without counting the art of drawing, necessary for various sorts of woodworking, the detail of which has been made the object of more than half of the second part of this work. This observation is altogether natural – it is the only art that, under the same name, has rapport with so many different objects. With the exception of carpentry, the art of woodworking embraces all which has to do with the use of wood, instead of those arts which have for its object the use of metals, taking different names, although using the same material. Because, without speaking of the use of mines and iron forges, the workers which use this metal, are known under different names, like the blacksmiths of two types, the locksmiths also of two types, the maker of edge-tools, the tinsmiths, the cutlers, the nailsmiths, and even the clockmakers, those who make mathematical instruments, and a number of others who do completely separate arts, distinct one from the others. Their description, if they be united in a single and same art, would contain more than ten to twelve volumes, assuming that they are treated according to the intentions of the Royal Academy of Sciences, that is to say, with the precision and all the appropriate extent for each of them.”
The folding bookstand in A.-J. Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier” is nice, but not nearly as fancy as the one I unearthed today while reorganizing my office.
This bookstand is shown in “L’Enseignement Professionnel du Menuisier” (book 1) by Léon Jamin. Jamin is listed at an “ancien collaborateur au Roubo,” but I don’t know enough about Jamin to say what that really means.
I purchased an original copy of the plates from this 19th-century book for professional woodworkers, and it is a delight to page through. One of the owners of the book performed all the recommended exercises on the backs of the plates, which are almost as fascinating as the plates themselves.
In this plate, No. 32, the author is illustrating how to draw the bookstand in perspective. The three images here are joined to one another at the edges, making for a complete exploration of all the details of the bookstand.
I don’t own a copystand (yet) for my camera, so I have included three high-resolution scans here for you to play with. Feel free to stitch the images together.
Now that I have completed the first and most intense step of editing and annotating the raw transliteration manuscript for “To Make as Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Furniture Making,” aka R2, my attentions will turn to and eventually be dedicated solely to the full pedal-to-the-metal effort to bring VIRTUOSO to fruition.
This does not mean our labors on R2 are done; far from it. Instead it means that my time with it will be episodic but perhaps even more intense periodically than the last half-year of my nearly all-Roubo-all-the-time life as Michele, Philippe and I revise and reconcile each other’s modifications to the work. In addition, I need to integrate the observations and suggestions from my readers Bob, Mike and Martin on things that need to be clarified or augmented.
But, the first draft is complete and sitting in the 3″-thick file folder next to my chair, awaiting only my entering of the last sections into the computer for sending off into the ether. About two-thirds is already there, with the remaining third flowing in several sections at a time almost every day.
This process will continue behind the curtain for months through the Lost Art Press editing, Wesley’s design and our galley-proof-review process some time next autumn, when we will once again wash our hands of the project in order to consign it to you and to move on ourselves.
In the meantime, beginning next week I will be stomping down on the gas for the Studley manuscript, weaving the many threads already extant with ones yet to be spun out of my notebook and Narayan’s photo gallery then deposited onto the screen, crafting a volume we hope will achieve some interest in the market.
This will be an exciting and somewhat disorienting time, as I will be ratcheting way back on the energies necessary for R2 to refocus and allow myself a pretty complete dedication to this new franchise. If I find myself crafting impossible syntax into 300-word sentences I will know that the reorientation is not yet complete. All of this is occurring against the backdrop of a time when Lost Art Press seems to be going into hyperdrive with excellent and desirable new volumes in the coming few dozen months.
This new endeavor includes many exciting opportunities, twists and turns, and I will certainly apprise you of them as they emerge.
