Category: James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints

Editor’s note: Today we are launching pre-publication sales of “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” by Brendan Gaffney. The book will ship in late November. If you order before the book ships, you will receive a free pdf download of the book at checkout. The book is $44.

I’d never heard of James Krenov until I started work for Popular Woodworking magazine in 1996. Growing up, the woodworking books in our house were practical. My dad needed them to build the houses (mostly by hand) on our farm.

One day I asked my boss at the magazine, Steve Shanesy, how he became a woodworker. His reply was a story that I have now heard repeated hundreds (maybe thousands) of times.

“I read ‘A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook’ by James Krenov and ‘The Soul of a Tree’ by George Nakashima,” Steve explained. “I left my job in public relations and went to a furniture school to learn the craft.”

I was astonished that a woodworking book could change the course of someone’s life. All the woodworking books I’d read were dry as a dead deerfly. So I bought “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” (the 1991 Sterling edition) at a used book store and read it in one day.

Krenov’s writing was intoxicating and friendly. He talked about ideas that had never crossed my mind. He eschewed originality in design. He tried to make furniture that was perfect but did not insist upon itself. He composed grain the way a painter works with a brush.

Who was this guy? There were scant details of his life in the book. But what he revealed made him seem exotic. Born in Russia, lived in Alaska and Sweden. And now he teaches at a remote school in California.

But how did Krenov become this person? And how did he become such an incredible woodworker and writer?

More than 20 years later, I asked Brendan Gaffney those two exact questions while we were sitting in a bar in Covington, Ky. Brendan had attended the fine woodworking program at the College of the Redwoods (now the Krenov School) and had ended up in Covington (a bit ironically) for a stint at Popular Woodworking Magazine.

This conversation with Brendan launched the exhaustive research that would become “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints.” For the last few years, Brendan has interviewed more than 150 people attached to Krenov’s life. He has pored over thousands of photos, documents and press clippings to piece together the story of Krenov’s long and interesting life.

I try not to describe our books with over-used and gaudy language. But Krenov’s story qualifies as a bonafide epic.

Thanks to Brendan’s dogged determination, “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” is a fully realized portrait of Krenov. It answers every question I ever had about the man, and helped me understand why he was such a man of huge contradictions. On the one hand, Krenov’s writing was warm and friendly. But he had a personal reputation of being difficult. While some students adored him, others found him critical and sharp-tongued.

Brendan’s biography does not shy away from this contradiction. In fact, after learning how Krenov struggled to find his place in the world, his writing, teaching and work makes much more sense now. After editing Brendan’s manuscript, I re-read “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” and the book was even more compelling and interesting as a result of knowing Krenov’s full life story.

We are thrilled to bring you “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” and we have tried to make a book that befits its subject matter. The book is printed on heavy 80# coated matte paper for crisp image reproduction. The pages are sewn and taped together to create a permanent binding. And the whole thing is wrapped in cotton-covered board and a 100# matte dust jacket. We think this book will be a joy to hold and to read.

— Christopher Schwarz

I’m a furniture maker first and a writer second, or maybe third (after, perhaps, being a master of tangential side projects). So, when I approached writing “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” my biography of the cabinetmaker who was the founder of the woodworking school I attended, it seemed appropriate to take part in retracing some of his steps as a craftsperson.

In Krenov’s body of work, there is one piece that always stood out to me for its graceful presence and idiosyncratic form: 1977’s “A Playful Thing,” detailed extensively in Krenov’s third book on cabinetmaking, “The Impractical Cabinetmaker.” The piece is a pivotal demarcation in Krenov’s output – both a reprisal of his 1962 “No-Glass Showcase of Lemon Wood” from the earliest stage of his career and a harbinger of his future output of leggy cabinets on stands. I also had the pleasure of seeing the piece in person; Krenov kept it and it is still in the family. Seeing it in person confirmed its appeal to me.

So, in February of 2019, I started my own version of the piece. I was happy to have both Krenov’s original drawings for the piece (published in “The Impractical Cabinetmaker”) as well as the insight I’d gained from examining much of his work. I had a pretty good footing to start on. But the understated form of this cabinet hides the complexity of its execution. Between the veneer work, the drawers that pass through both ends of the carcase, the carefully carved and chamfered legs and rails, and the drive to make every inch just right, even from unlikely views below or above, it is a real skill test. By the time I started this piece, I was five years out of the College of the Redwoods (now The Krenov School), and while I like to think my skills are always improving, the truth is that this kind of work requires constant practice and refinement of execution to be done properly and gracefully. I had some uphill battles.

Krenov’s original was made with East Indian rosewood and Andaman padauk, woods I wasn’t going to hold my breath looking for these days, but after trips up to Keim Lumber in Millersburg, Ohio, and C.R. Muterspaw in Xenia, Ohio, I came home with some stunning gonçalo alves for the stand/drawer fronts and densely figured soft maple for the veneered surfaces. I rounded those out with aromatic cedar for the drawer bottoms, hard maple for the drawer sides and African blackwood for the pulls, and I’m pleased with my choices.

The result, which I’m happy to still have in our bedroom a year and a half later (and 750 miles from Covington, Ky., where I built it), came out in the way as do many reprisals or reiterations of another maker’s design: different and telling of my process, but in the spirit of Krenov’s original, I think.

Are the proportions exact to Krenov’s original? No. Is the shaping identical? Definitely not. Am I James Krenov? Well, come on, of course not. But in making this piece, and walking a few months in Krenov’s shop slippers, I learned quite a bit. I noticed certain aspects of the piece’s construction that betray Krenov’s history: the dexterous use of a knife in carving the legs and the pulls recall his early life spent carving with a jackknife in Alaska; the aesthetic touch of stepped chamfers and an almost architectural composition echo his teacher, Carl Malmsten, whose roots were firmly planted in the English Arts & Crafts movement.

There is a second stream of influence the piece has exerted over the year and half since I finished building it. With an open and inviting showcase area, what Krenov referred to as a “stage,” it is too hard to resist constantly rotating and replacing small objects to showcase. I find myself picking up the objects in residence and looking them over, something I wouldn’t necessarily do if they were tucked away on a shelf or in a glass cabinet.

And this action, the constant consideration and handling of small, fine objects, might be the most impactful effect this piece had on my consideration of Krenov’s work. Krenov often insisted that his showcase cabinets “complemented” the pieces they displayed, and while the cabinet itself might be artfully done or worthy of examination, it wasn’t doing its job well if it couldn’t elevate or showcase its contents. While I’d read Krenov’s words regarding this, actually living with something that encouraged this interaction made it clear. Throughout his lectures, personal papers and his books, Krenov mentions craftspeople from other mediums, like the potters Bernard Leach or Eva Zeisel, in that light, showcase cabinets like “A Playful Thing” make perfect sense of his role as a cabinetmaker. It may be a “chicken-and-egg” problem – whether his appreciation for small crafts came before his penchant for making showcase cabinets or vice versa, but either way, living with this piece has made it clear how Krenov saw that role.

You can’t write a book by building cabinets. Nor can you build a cabinet just by digging through lumberyards and antique stores. But if you can balance these experiences in just the right way, they might just culminate in work that is more than the sum of its parts. I can’t say I’m sure I got there with my cabinet, but the cabinet helped me consider Krenov’s life and work.

— Brendan Gaffney

We are taught from a young age that compromise and flexibility are golden attributes. I have seen their reward; I won’t go too far into my own sinuous background, but putting myself into different settings with good people, following their lead or being willing to bend my own path, has brought wonderful experiences and opportunities. In woodworking, it’s been ventures into chairmaking, Krenovian cabinetmaking, historic techniques, slapdash construction and basketweaving. In life, it means having a Master’s in computer music, working at a large media/publishing company, working with CNCs to produce violin parts, writing a book, living in five states in less than a decade and being an underemployed but happy craftsperson.

In my three years of researching, interviewing and writing “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” a second lesson in compromise has emerged. There is a lot in Krenov’s story that points to the other side of the coin – the side that makes itself apparent when someone refuses to compromise their worldview or creative practice, even at the cost of their own well-being or success. To me, both the reward and punishment of that second approach is no more apparent than in Krenov’s trajectory from an obscure travelogue writer to a widely celebrated cabinetmaker.

As I interviewed people about Krenov – his students, colleagues, friends, supporters and detractors – the downside of his attitude became apparent. Krenov’s frequent lack of diplomacy in expressing his approach to craft closed doors and alienated many. It took him several tries at educational institutions to find a situation that met his demands or could handle his irascibility concerning the validity of other approaches. His articles in Sweden’s FORM magazine express his disenfranchisement from Scandinavian contemporaries and consumers, often because he thought they would not appreciate or adopt his idiosyncratic approach (though it was there that he reached a level of renown few could hope for). His outlook often made Krenov hard to please, and kept him looking on the other side of the fence (or ocean) for greener grass. It made it difficult (for many years, impossible) to make a living at his craft.

But in this lack of compromise, we can see the seeds of Krenov’s success. At the beginning of his career, a time when Scandinavia was moving toward functionalism and practicality, Krenov declared himself and his work to be outside of those considerations. He called for craftspeople, amateur and professional, to enjoy their work, whatever the wider public insisted about its efficacy or profitability. He was the strongest advocate for the inherent worth of work done well.

So many of us who insist on making furniture or practicing a craft at the highest standards we can muster, rationalize our position and damn the time or impracticality of its execution. We insist that our work is more durable and a better investment, or more timeless and not subject to trendiness or fads.

At several point in his career, Krenov relays these considerations – but he was working to different criteria, not obviously connected to financial or aesthetic concerns. Looking over his work and the lessons he taught, it’s clear that these were secondary (or even tertiary) concerns. He encouraged impracticality and insisted that his way was too difficult to be of use to a professional woodworker. He wanted to be remembered as a “stubborn, old enthusiast.”

I don’t mean to imply a lack of subtlety to his position; in fact, many of his favored students eschewed his path in aesthetics, technique and financial success. I offer up the idea that the “middle path” Krenov described between handwork and machine work – a compromise from many perspectives – was part of what made it so successful and appealing to his hundreds of thousands of readers. And there were students who disagreed with his advice that he came to support or enable – in spite of their resistance. He butted heads with students who, like him, insisted on the value of their own ideas, but in the end many of them won his respect. He could be an inspiring teacher and a friendly mentor, whimsical and enthusiastic.

Krenov’s ability to resist outside influence, especially in terms of income, was enabled by the support of Britta, his wife, who was a high school teacher with a degree in economics and finance. He was also supported by the socialist infrastructure of Sweden, which awarded him stipends and gave Britta a steady pension after her retirement in the late 1970s.

But there is a lesson that can be distilled from Krenov’s path. It isn’t exactly “stick to your guns” or “ignore the haters.” But, after years of my own consideration of Krenov’s story and the memories of those who crossed his path, I think one part of the whole reads something like this: Take in what you can from those around you when you set off, work hard to examine what you value and/or enjoy in your chosen pursuit and be determined enough to pursue it at whatever cost.

It may not lead to success in any traditional sense. Krenov’s career might be measured in book sales or influence, but I think it’s best measured by the memories that were shared with me. His students remember Krenov’s satisfaction in shaping the leg of a stand late into the evenings, or the time he spent happily arranging and composing a freshly sawn batch of veneers. Pursue fulfillment; if you’re lucky or dogged or particularly talented, other measures of success might come to pass. If you’re not, at least you can say it wasn’t a waste of time.

There are many ways to poke holes in this idea as it applies to your own world; I’m not one to promote orthodoxy or dogma. You might be able to follow Krenov’s path with a more polite or amenable attitude. You could pick fulfillment as a guide, and still frequently change the tack of your pursuit. But if you read Krenov’s story (and I hope you will) I think the case study in rigidity and conviction that he lived is worthy of consideration. It is not a prescription, but it might be a part of finding your own path.

— Brendan Gaffney

“Krenov’s first commission, a teak cutlery box, was commissioned by an American anti-Communist spy turned short fiction writer in 1958, and was paid for with a bottle of Scotch whisky.“

That’s a fun mouthful. It’s one of the crazier sentences I jotted down as I interviewed people for my forthcoming biography “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints.”

During the research for the book, which spans the nine decades of James Krenov’s life and four continents, I was lucky to converse with people who knew and worked with Krenov from the 1950s to the late 2000s. The biography, due out this year, will reveal the fruit born from these connections. And as I reflect on the process now, with the book nearly ready for publication, I’m amazed by the people I had the privilege of talking to throughout my work.

Since September 2018, I interviewed about 150 people around the globe, and I think that highlighting a few of these far-flung folks might hint at the breadth of Krenov’s life.

I reached back as far as I could to find living voices, and I was terrifically lucky to find three people who knew Krenov at the outset of his cabinetmaking career in 1957. The first, and perhaps the most “larger-than-life” character, was Harley Sachs. Today, Sachs works as a board game designer and fiction writer, and has retired to a quiet life in Oregon after living in five countries and traveling the world. He’s now in his late 80s, and was a terrifically loquacious interviewee.

Sachs went to Stockholm in 1957 on the GI Bill after (what he describes as) an odd stint as a misfit in the American military during the war in Korea. While in Stockholm, Sachs worked as an English language teacher and an informant and undercover agent for the American government, who worked against Communist influences in Sweden. Sachs doesn’t recall how he met Krenov, but says his work as a spy drew him to the man. Krenov’s own history, as a Russian-born, trilingual American citizen in Stockholm, would have made him a great potential agent. But Sachs recalled that Krenov was uninterested, though they struck up a friendship that would lead to Krenov’s being Sachs’s best man in his wedding in 1960.

While Sachs only knew of Krenov’s woodworking tangentially, not being a craftsperson himself, he was, perhaps, Krenov’s first client. Sachs commissioned a small dovetailed teak cutlery box, for a nice set of stainless flatware he bought while in Sweden. Unable to pay a satisfactory price, Krenov instead enlisted Sachs (and his connections at the American embassy) to find a fine bottle of Scotch whisky. The case is still in use today by Sachs’s daughter, Cynthia Sachs-Bustos, and holds that same flatware that it was made for more than 60 years ago. A small inscription on the underside of the box’s removable tray, written by Sachs years after its construction, notes that the box is the “first cutlery chest made by Jim Krenov,” an allusion to the fact that Krenov would go on to make a series of “Silver Chests” in his career as a woodworker.

I was able to track down and interview two more people from the 1950s who knew Krenov well, and both were woodworkers themselves. Krenov attended Carl Malmsten’s Verkstadsskolla from 1957 to 1959, and thanks to Malmsten Foundation Chairman Lars Ewö (by way of one of my chairmaking students, Matthew Nafranowicz) I was able to get a list of students from Krenov’s years at the school. After some sleuthing, I contacted Manne Ideström and Kjell Orrling. Neither Ideström or Orrling continued on in their careers as woodworkers. Today, Ideström works as a minister and choral director in Ontario, after moving from Sweden in the 1970s as a partner in his father’s furniture manufacturing business. Orrling is just an hour’s drive away from him, also in Ontario, where he now works as an incredible watercolorist, having sold the lighting fixture business that brought him to Canada in 1973.

Often times, in interviewing people about past events I feel guilty asking them to recall those memories – who can be expected to reach back so far with any clarity? But both Orrling and Ideström easily recalled Krenov, perhaps due to his oddity and unique presence as a student. His classmates were largely in their late teens or early 20s, but Krenov was 37 when he enrolled at Malmsten’s school, and Orrling remembers Krenov’s penchant for reciting poetry and reading from his favorite books during mealtimes in the workshop, a habit that Krenov kept up when he later became a teacher. Orrling also provided photos, some of which are reproduced here, from his time at Malmsten’s school. And there is Krenov, the earliest photo of him working wood. How appropriate it is that he is using a doweling jig and a small hand drill – both practices he would share with readers and students.

Perhaps the most memorable interview for the book wasn’t with someone who had ever heard of Krenov, though he did know about the church that Krenov’s father, Dmitri, built in Sleetmute, Alaska.

Much of Krenov’s early life is tied to the lives of indigenous people of Siberia and Alaska, in particular the Chukchi of far Eastern Siberia, the Yupik people of Sleetmute, Alaska, and the Dena’ina people of Tyonek, Alaska. The Chukchi people of Siberia are a well-researched and documented group, and I had a wonderful time researching them as a part of my writing. But when it came to the natives of Alaska, I had a hard time finding the correct terminologies, histories and surviving documents. Unequipped with the all-important “keywords” that might bring up the correct documents, I decided to rely on one of the great interconnecting presences in America – the postal service.

Last spring, while Sleetmute was still covered in snow, I found the number of the local post office branch. Sleetmute is a town of 86, hundreds of miles up the Kuskokwim River from Bethel, and I suspected that if I could get in touch with just one resident, they would surely know who might be able to answer my questions. The clerk, sure enough, told me to call “Frank,” the oldest of the village elders who he thought would welcome the odd call from Kentucky. Frank answered and was happy to spend an hour on the phone with me. I wish I could give you Frank’s full name, or link to a website as I did with the people above, but I never got any such information, nor did it seem appropriate – Frank was happy to be in a place he noted as deeply isolated. He was able to share what he knew of Sleetmute’s history, confirmed the dates of the flood that Krenov’s mother noted in her unpublished memoir, and even better, he was simply happy to chat with a curious outsider. His father was Yugoslavian, his mother was Yupik, and he had lived all of his seven decades on the Kuskokwim River. He also had a few choice jokes about Columbus and his being the “first person to collect American welfare” from the natives he came to colonize and enslave, and told me a good five-minute story that turned out to be a pun on the name of the Yupik tribe (the punchline was something like, “No, YOU pick!”).

This biography, which I am thrilled to say will be in the hands of readers soon, is really just a spun thread composed of the collective memories of dozens of such conversations, writings and photographs. Over the course of the years of research, I’ve realized the power of picking up the phone and finding a friendly and talkative person on the other end of the line. I’ll end with an encouragement, one I heard from many. Share your stories with those around you and with those strangers who might just be interested. Harley Sachs surely has, as is evidenced in his voluminous list of publications. So, too, have Manne Ideström and Kjell Orrling, through their music and artwork. And so, too, did Frank, with the curious young man calling from Kentucky.

— Brendan Gaffney