Category: Personal Favorites

We don’t know who originally wrote the 1839 book “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.” There’s no author listed anywhere in any of the editions we’ve found. And many long nights of searching Google Books for clues have turned up mostly dead ends.

The reason I have spent hours looking into this mystery is that the book’s tale of Thomas Walters, the joiner’s apprentice, rings true. As if the author had been an apprentice joiner or cabinet maker. And if the author really was an apprentice, then “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” is an even more important book that Joel Moskowitz or I thought.

Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick has been copy editing the book for us, and she has a theory about who the author was. Keep in mind that Megan has a William Shakespeare problem, so muddy questions of authorship bring out the Nancy Drew in her.

Megan’s theory: The author was Tredgold, an early 19th-century engineer.

Megan thinks that Tredgold is the author because “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” goes out of its way to praise him as a “very eminent scientific writer.” And then praises Tredgold saying that he had “received no better an education at school than we have supposed our apprentice to have had.” And on and on. Tredgold, Tredgold, Tredgold!

So I decided to sniff down the Tredgold path.

Clue No. 1: Though it’s not mentioned in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” Tredgold’s first name is “Thomas,” the same name as the hero of the book. Coincidence?

Clue No. 2: Tredgold was a carpenter’s apprentice starting at age 14 in Durham, a northern English county that has a history of mining and agriculture. The shop in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” was also a rural shop.

Clue No. 3: Tredgold was a writer. Among other books, he authored “Elementary Principles of Carpentry,” a landmark volume in the history of construction.

So I was ready to drink the Tredgold Kool-Aid until I looked a little closer. Perhaps Megan has a thing about both Shakespeare and zombie authors. Tredgold died in 1829 – 10 years before the earliest known edition of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” was published.

While it is possible that Tredgold wrote the book and it was published posthumously, I think it’s unlikely. With our current leads all dead, maybe we’ll break out the Ouija board at our next dinner party and try to solve the mystery.

— Christopher Schwarz

Like a lot of hand tool woodworkers, I wonder what it would be like to work wood in a time where mastering wood and tools was an essential skill to survival and success. After a few moments of reverie, I quickly thank my stars that I was born in the 20th century.

I am legally blind. Really. My vision is terrible. One time I let my eyeglasses prescription lapse, and then even with my glasses on I was considered legally blind (the diagnosis of the optometrist). Eyeglasses weren’t tolerated in early woodworking shops. Wear glasses, and you were sacked. It was a sign of being old.

When I was 15, I contracted pneumonia. I was so sick that I can remember clutching the rubbery bladder of my water bed (please don’t ask) and wishing I were dead. Had I been born before antibiotics, I probably would have gotten my wish.

I could keep going. When I was a kid, my front teeth stuck out like I was holding two little communion wafers between my lips. I have the upper body strength of a jellyfish. I got chicken pox twice. In other words, Natural Selection has been trying to weed me out of the garden for a long time, and it has only been through the grace of technology that I am still here and able to work wood.

So anytime I start thinking about how cool it would be to live in the time of Duncan Phyfe, I think how cool it is to be breathing right now.

Our new book “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” paints a rather rosy picture of an apprentice’s life in a shop, and co-author Joel Moskowitz has tried to balance it with accounts of how horrible some apprenticeships were.

And I have tried to balance the narrative by remaining alive, even though by the 19th-century perspective, I should be dead or – even worse – the village idiot.

— Christopher Schwarz

In 1839, an English publisher issued a small book on woodworking that has – until now – escaped detection by scholars, historians and woodworkers.

Titled “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” this short book was written by an anonymous tradesman and tells the fictional tale of Thomas, a lad of 13 or 14 who is apprenticed to a rural shop that builds everything from built-ins to more elaborate veneered casework. The book was written to guide young people who might be considering a life in the joinery or cabinetmaking trades, and every page is filled with surprises.

Unlike other woodworking books at the time, “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” focuses on how apprentices can obtain the basic skills needed to work in a hand-tool shop. It begins with Thomas tending the fire to keep the hide glue warm, and it details how he learns stock preparation, many forms of joinery and casework construction. It ends with Thomas building a veneered mahogany chest of drawers that is French polished.

Thanks to this book, we can stop guessing at how some operations were performed by hand and read first-hand how joints were cut and casework was assembled in one rural England shop.

Even more delightful is that Thomas builds three projects during the course of his journey in the book, and there is enough detail in the text and illustrations to re-create these three projects just as they were built in 1839.

“The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” was virtually unknown to modern woodworkers until Joel Moskowitz of Tools for Woorking Wood obtained a copy and immediately saw its significance. He loaned a copy to me, and as soon as a I read the book I knew that we had to republish it.

Simply reprinting the book would have been the easy path, however. What Joel and I did was much more involved.

This month we are putting the final touches on a project that has taken untold hours of research, building, drafting and writing. This fall, Lost Art Press will republish the original text of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” with additional chapters that will help you understand why the book is important, plus details that will make you a better hand-tool woodworker. In our expanded edition, you’ll find:

• A historical snapshot of early 19th-century England. Joel Moskowitz, a book collector and avid history buff, explains what England was like at the time this book was written, including the state of the labor force and woodworking technology. This dip into the historical record will expand your enjoyment of Thomas’s tale in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”

• The complete text of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” unabridged and unaltered. We present every word of the 1839 original (plus a chapter on so-called “modern tools” added in a later edition), with footnotes from Moskowitz that will help you understand the significance of the story.

• Chapters on the construction of the three projects from “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.” I built all three projects – a Packing Box, a dovetailed Schoolbox and a Chest of Drawers – using hand tools (confession: I ripped the drawer stock on my table saw). My chapters in this new edition of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” show the operations in the book, explain details on construction and discuss the hand-tool methods that have arisen since this book was originally published.

• Complete construction drawings. I drafted all three projects in SketchUp to create detailed drawings and cutting lists for the modern woodworker. This will save you the hours we spent decoding the construction information offered in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”

In the end, we got more than we bargained for in our effort to bring this book back to life. To be sure, I expected to become a better hand-tool woodworker by building these projects, but I didn’t expect this book to give me my own apprentice to train. You’ll have to read the book to find out more about that.

Like all Lost Art Press books, “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” will be hardbound, printed on quality acid-free paper and made in the United States. As soon as we have a release date, we will publish it here. In the meantime, look for additional blog entries here about the “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” and its significance to the hand-tool woodworker.

— Christopher Schwarz

My city editor put down the phone, pursed her lips and looked at me, a scrawny and green 20-year-old newspaper intern.

“That was the Klan,” she said. “They are pissed at you.”

That summer I was an intern at my hometown paper, the Southwest Times Record, a small daily in Fort Smith, Ark. Most of that summer I wrote hard-hitting pieces about mutant chicken trading societies, Chamber of Commerce luncheons and the hot weather.

But all summer long I also worked on a series of articles about how the local public schools were still as segregated as they were in 1954. Still as segregated as they were when I went through the system. And so segregated that the local NAACP was considering a lawsuit.

After my stories ran, the Klan called the newsroom to ask about the New York Jew-boy reporter sent down by the ACLU to stir up the black population. And to tell me that I should watch my back.

I was terrified. And then I was furious. Those people didn’t know me. I’d lived in that town since I was 5. I went to public elementary, junior high and high school there. I was a member of First Presbyterian Church. And I doubt the ACLU even knew my hometown existed.

This week I stumbled on the first woodworking chisel I ever bought. It’s a Popular Mechanics 1/2″ bevel-edge chisel I bought from Wal-Mart about four presidents ago. It was my only chisel for about eight years. But I took good care of it until I bought my first set of Marples.

I’ve forgotten how much I actually like that little chisel. Sure, the steel is as soft as the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and the handle is a lovely clear plastic. But that was the chisel I used to chop out my first dovetails. My first mortise. My first half-lap.

As I looked it over I noticed it was getting some rust on it. So I decided to bring it back to its former blue-light special glory. As I worked on the tool, my mind began to wander to the e-mail beatings I’ve been taking lately for some tool reviews I’ve written – reviews both positive and negative.

These whuppings come with the territory, but sometimes they do get to me. (Just like I’m sure my reviews occasionally annoy other people.)

As I honed the secondary bevel of the chisel this morning I held it up to the light and thought, “This is who I am.”

I’m taking this chisel home tonight to give to my youngest daughter, Katy. It’s not the best tool in the world, but it is a good place to start. And it does come with a lesson, one that I learned that summer day at the Southwest Times Record.

Despite my city editor’s warnings that day, I walked out the front door of the paper to my car every day that summer instead of ducking out the door by the pressroom.

— Christopher Schwarz

Like every woodworker, I have a short list of tools that I wish were still widely available today. Most of these are tools that have wound up in my shop and proved themselves useful.

About five years ago I got a cool mallet that was common in England but not so much here. It has a heavy brass head, wooden striking faces and a nice chamfered handle.

The whole thing weighs more than 3 pounds – my wife weighed herself with it on our digital scale. Then she weighed herself without the mallet. (That is what passes for both love and entertainment in the early 40s.)

This is not a tool you want to wield all day. In fact, mortising with it wears out my forearm after only a couple mortises.

However, it is great for assembly tasks. It knocks dovetails together with ease. I use it for driving drawbore pins – both through a dowel plate and into the holes. I use it for knocking together mortise-and-tenon joints. If you want to see it in action, check out this video on YouTube. Anytime I need force with finesse I reach for this tool.

Well, I used to.

About a year ago, the wooden striking faces dropped out of the brass head like two rotted teeth. They had shrunk out just enough – friction was the glue. I set the mallet aside on my bookshelves until a month ago. I decided to try to fix the thing.

I considered fabricating new wooden faces, but their shape is complex. So I decided to first try to get the pyramid-shaped faces back in their holes. The staff at the magazine suggested removing a little wood from the back of the faces and driving the faces back into the brass. The hope was that this would compress the wood, and friction would do its job again (lazy friction).

I tried it. It didn’t work. Another suggestion was to drill through the brass head and pin the faces with a metal rivet. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that kind of implant surgery.

So today I took a different tack: high-impact epoxy. I glued and clamped the faces in place this morning, and now I’m just waiting for the clock to make it around the horn again so I can take the thing for a test beat.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I know that Australian toolmaker Chris Vesper has this tool on his drawing board. If you’re interested, you should drop him a line through his web site. To see a photo of his prototype mallets scroll to the bottom of this page.