I wasn’t born or raised in Cincinnati, but I feel a deep kinship with the city and its incredibly rich history with the decorative arts, including furniture.
The city was a hotbed of decorative carving in the 19th century, with a world-class school devoted to carving that was dominated by women. Furniture-wise, the city experienced an intense Asian-inspired burst of creativity in the 1880s that resulted in many furniture companies here producing Asian-inspired furniture that was sold all over North America. The Greene Brothers were born here. Rookwood Pottery was founded here — and is still here and making objects of intense beauty.
And we had the Shop of the Crafters.
Now, if you are a fan of Arts & Crafts furniture, you might have heard of this shop, which is now beneath a highway I drive on every morning on my way to work. The Shop of the Crafters was different than all the assorted Stickleys that populated New York.
The output of the Shop of the Crafters was unique because of its inlay, European influence and profound unevenness. In the Cincinnati Art Museum, there is a display of some of the shop’s work. On the left is a beautiful china cabinet that delights you the more you stare at it. On the right is a clock that looks like it was made with home center materials.
I have owned a Shop of the Crafters Morris chair since I was 23, and it is one of my most favorite tangible objects. I bought it from an antiques warehouse in South Carolina for $335. They had a big scarecrow sitting in it and the cushions were green leatherette covered in the ugliest flowers you’ve ever seen.
But I scrimped and saved for that chair (we qualified for Food Stamps at the time) and it is the first thing you’ll see when you walk into our house.
Today Lucy, Katy and I went to the Cincinnati Art Museum and I renewed my love affair with many of the decorative objects in their collection. If you come to Woodworking in America this fall, I hope you’ll take some time out to visit this absolute jewel box of a museum. Admission is free (thanks to the sweat and blood of me and my co-workers). But the wankers now charge for parking.
I’m good with CAD. And I’m good with Google SketchUp. Still, Robert W. Lang has me beat by a mile.
His new eBook, “Woodworker’s Guide to SketchUp,” is so far ahead of anything I’ve read before that it is in a class by itself. It begins by teaching you the basic strokes – even if you’ve never used SketchUp you’ll be in fine fettle. But it takes you so far so fast, you’ll wonder why no one ever conceived of this sort of product before.
The genius of “Woodworker’s Guide to SketchUp” is that it exploits every iota of its medium to make the process of learning SketchUp – the greatest free gift to woodworkers ever – as easy as possible.
Yes, there is text. And screen shots of the important steps that lead to a proper drawing. But the real killer is the short bursts of video that are embedded in the text. Sometimes when you need to see motion, Lang has created short movies that elegantly show you how to create a moulding or a turned part in SketchUp – something that is hard to explain with a static medium.
For Woodworkers – Really and Truly The other big plus to this eBook – which is available on CD – is that it is totally unlike the tutorials offered by Google. Google’s short video tutorials are designed for people who are building cities or (at the least) houses. Building furniture is easy with SketchUp, just not with Google’s instructions.
“Woodworker’s Guide to SketchUp” is all about woodworking – building furniture-scale components, mouldings, turnings, cutting lists and the like with no silly trees or pitched roofs and bushes. Want to build a living room floorplan with square corners? The Google directions will do fine. Want to make cabriole legs, cabinets, bookshelves, built-ins and frame-and-panel doors? You need Lang’s new CD.
He shows you stuff that Google doesn’t even think to show you. Make dovetailed drawers, coped-stick doors – then alter those basic components with just a few clicks and drags to suit your needs.
The skeptical among you might be thinking that I’m writing this review because I work with Lang and that he’s paying me off. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He handed me his CD to review it for technical errors, and I became totally sucked into the text and have spent the last three nights studying the text, looking at the drawings and marveling at the short videos.
Heck, my parent company doesn’t even carry this CD – Lang has written and published it on his own – so I have no financial interest in the product. But I do have two $20 bills in my pocket, which I plan to lay on his desk in the morning in exchange for this CD.
You, however, don’t have to pay as much. Until July 1 you can order this CD from Lang’s web site for $29.95 with free shipping in the United States and Canada. It is absolutely the best money you will spend on improving your woodworking all year. For less than the cost of a router bit, you will be able to draw anything your brain imagines and transform it until you can build it in wood, steel and brass.
I rarely say this: Buy this. Cash in your pennies, sell some plasma and just buy it. “Woodworker’s Guide to SketchUp” is a mind-blowing revelation for anyone who wants to design simple or complex projects using this free design software.
I’ve hesitated to write this blog entry because it will seem self-serving. But by now, all the people who visit this blog have made a decision. Either you’ve bought “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” or you haven’t.
So I’m not trying to change your mind about the book. I really don’t care either way if you buy it. In fact, if you want to borrow my copy to read it, drop me a line. I trust woodworkers to send it back.
Today, April 4, is one year to the day that I threw myself into this project like a virgin into a volcano. I’d read the original 1839 text about three or four times. I’d bought $300 worth of white pine and another $300 of black cherry harvested from an Indiana cemetery. (Yes, I do worry that the wood is cursed.)
As I stood before the pile of wood in the shop I wondered if I was doing the right thing. It would be so much easier just to republish the original 1839 text with some quick historical notes. That finished book could be at the printer in a matter of a couple weeks. Instead, I thought it would be a good idea to test the original text by rebuilding the three projects by hand, just as Thomas – the hero of the book – did.
There was no guarantee that I’d learn anything from the process. In fact, there really wasn’t anything presented in the 1839 text that I didn’t already know how to do quite well by hand – mortising, tenoning, dovetails, stock prep, carcase construction. I’ve been comfortable with all those hand operations for some time.
So I was looking for something else when I started slicing into the pine to make the Packing Box, the first project in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.” But I didn’t quite know what.
Let me spoil the ending: I did learn something that I now carry with me every day. But I didn’t realize it until the book was published and mailed out to readers. My little moment of insight came months later when I was building a reproduction of a small side table for the White Water Shaker Village.
Unlike when building projects for “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” there were no “rules” about how this Shaker table got built. I could crank up the CNC machine (if I had one) and barf out the table. But I didn’t take the machine route. Sure, I used a couple machines to get the legs into shape. Those were a nightmare.
But almost everything else was by hand. Why? Because I knew this table had something to teach me, even though I had no idea what that something was.
I know this is starting to sound like an Escher drawing so let me short-circuit the spiral. Hand skills develop differently than machine skills. I can say this because I have both. Hand skills develop in strange ways that aren’t linear.
When you learn to saw – really flipping saw – you learn something else other than tracking a line. You learn what perpendicular is. Not theoretical perpendicular. Real gut-check perpendicular. You can look at anything, and and your perpendicular senses start tingling when things are just right.
And that makes you awesome with a chisel, moulding planes and the brace. Learn to saw, and the quality of your mortises take off.
Oh and so does your ability to prepare stock by hand. Once you know perpendicular, you quickly learn flat and you learn to sense right angles. So stock prep becomes easier. You don’t need to try your stock with winding sticks as much, you can feel, hear and quickly see when your stock is twisted, cupped or bowed.
So “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” made me a junky for this stuff. Somewhere out there are a set of tasks that will unlock my ability to saw curves the way I want to saw curves. So when it came time to build my next workbench, I decided to give up the machines as much as possible. Not because of something about personal hand-tool purity. Far from it.
I just want to be better than you. And this is the fastest way to get there.
I never solicit reviews of my work. In this business, that is called “logrolling” – I’ll pretend to enjoy your book if you pretend to enjoy mine.
Most of the crap on the backs of books is logrolling. Ignore it.
When we get an honest review from someone who has taken the time to really read the book, think about it and write down their thoughts, we want to share it. Simon St.Laurent wrote a detailed review of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” for WoodCentral.com that was posted today. I haven’t seen as thoughtful a review of our work to date.
I spent about a year of my life reading, researching, building and writing the text that accompanies “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” with one hope. That someone, anyone, would understand why this book was important. How its grounding in 1839 is still relevant in 2010. And what we as woodworkers can take away from the experiences of the fictional apprentice named Thomas W.
Don’t be fooled. Simon’s review isn’t a gush-fest. He’s thought about these issues as much as we have. And for that reason, his review is definitely worth a close read.
“To Make As Perfectly As Possible” by Donald C. Williams and Michele P. Pagan
Andre Roubo’s 1769 “L’Art du Menusier” is one of the most important Western works on woodworking. Roubo, a learned man and a Master Cabinetmaker, chronicled the craft and its tools from the unique perspective of a practicing menusier (woodworker). Yet until now his five-volume masterwork has never been translated into English.
Lost Art Press is pleased to announce that we will publish the first of two volumes of Roubo in 2011 (the second in 2013) that have been translated into English and annotated by a special three-person team that possesses unique knowledge of the history of woodworking and the language, history, craft and skills of 18th-century France. Our title for these volumes, “To Make as Perfectly as Possible,” is taken from a phrase Roubo used repeatedly in his exhortations to excellence.
As a result, these two volumes – one on marquetry and the other on furniture making – will be more than a simple transliteration of the text. These books aim to capture the spirit and intent of Roubo, explain the processes in language that a modern woodworker can understand and (in some cases) fill in the gaps of knowledge that Roubo assumed his readers would have.
Work on this project is well underway. And after reading more than 80 pages of the team’s initial work, I can tell you that it is mind-blowing and is easily the most important publishing project I have ever been involved in.
The Team and its Work
The translation process begins with Michele P. Pagan, a Washington, D.C.,-based textiles conservator with more than 20 years experience in preservation of historic materials. Ms. Pagan has previously translated conservation and other historical and technical materials privately for colleagues.
Pagan translates Roubo as verbatim as possible, making no alterations to the original syntax unless that renders it incomprehensible. This is the best way to capture both the information and the flavor of the original.
Then the text goes to Donald C. Williams, an internationally recognized furniture conservator, educator, writer and scholar who has been employed for more than two decades by the nation’s largest cultural institution in Washington, D.C. He is the co-author of the highly successful “Saving Stuff” (Fireside: Simon & Schuster, 2005), and is an expert furniture-maker, marqueter and finisher (his specialty is shellac).
Williams edits the text, reconfiguring it as much as necessary to make it readable to an artisan of the 21st century. He is not rewriting Roubo, but merely modifying it enough to make it comprehensible and read smoothly. He also inserts explanations of some of Roubo’s processes. Readers of this blog may be most familiar with his writings on historic finishes (especially shellac) and historical tool marks.
After a couple rounds of editing, the manuscript then goes to his colleague Philippe Lafargue who trained as a traditional chair maker at the Ecole Boulle in Paris. He is well-versed in the arcane jargon of ancient French cabinetmaking, which is fortunate since some of the phrases Roubo used are simply untranslatable otherwise. Lafargue reviews the result from the perspective of a native Frenchman and historical craftsman to make sure the new English version would meet with Roubo’s approval.
In addition to this, Williams is constructing tools and exercises contained in Roubo, combining photos with new essays on the making and using of the tools, and explaining processes that Roubo glosses over.
The Result Lost Art Press will publish two large-format hardbound volumes (the exact size has not been established), on acid-free paper with Smyth-sewn signatures. Like all Lost Art Press books, these will be produced entirely in the United States, from production to printing to binding. We have not yet determined the price.
The volumes will feature replicas of the artful original plates, plus the translated text with details of the plates inserted into the text at the appropriate place.
As this project advances we will keep you posted here on this blog. I’ve already received two extensive chapters for review and am practically sick that I cannot tell you everything I’ve learned so far. But I guarantee this: It will be worth the wait.
When we first spoke of this project, Williams stated the team’s goal as, “… to let the reader practically experience the sounds of the saws and fragrance of the wood shavings and glue pot in the shops where Roubo worked.”
