Lost Art Press

Category: To Make as Perfectly as Possible, Roubo Translation

Meet the Author: Philippe Lafargue

Posted on by Kara Uhl

Editor’s Note: Philippe Lafargue, along with Michele Pietryka-Pagán and Don Williams, are the folks we have to thank for “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry,” which we first published in 2013, and “With All Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture,” which we first published in 2017.

Those editions are now sold out. However, the new deluxe edition of “With All Precision Possible” is now available, and we plan to offer a deluxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” soon.

Philippe, Michele and Don are also working on more volumes of Roubo, with a focus on interior carpentry, garden carpentry and carriages.

Philippe Lafargue was born in the southwest region of France, in the Basque country, in a town called Biarritz.

“It’s called the little California of France,” Philippe says. “It resembles the California coast because of the cliffs, beachgoers and surfing. The weather is pretty mild all year round, and you have mountains in the background. I was lucky to be born there and raised there. I had access to the natural beauty of the environment, which was very nurturing.”

Philippe lived with his parents, grandparents and older brother in a small, one-floor house with a basement.

“I would find refuge in the basement because we were crowded in the house,” he says. “I remember the winter months when I sheltered there. The furnace was there so it was warm and I could see the rain falling but I was protected.”

In the basement was an old workbench, anchored to the wall. Philippe worked on projects on that bench, imprecise but creative work that he loved. He also spent a lot of time at his uncle’s farm.

At times, Philippe found it difficult to feel motivated in school outside of the more artistic classes. He loved hands-on classes that inspired new ways of looking at things and doing things. He connected with a teacher at school who helped him get started in airplane model making.

Early on, Philippe knew he wanted to be a cabinetmaker.

“I was fascinated with the work of a cabinetmaker,” he says. “I wanted to be a true cabinetmaker, making case furniture. I don’t know where this came from.”

He wonders if he was, in part, influenced by all the furniture, made by a local cabinetmaker, in his parents’ house.

“You could buy what you could afford at the time, so it’s not very attractive,” he says. “But it’s very well done.”

As a teen, he was set to study cabinetmaking at school, theory and practice. But three months before the course was slated to begin, academic offerings shifted regionally. Suddenly, cabinetmaking wasn’t available based on where Philippe lived, and none of the other options offered to him interested him.

“I told the staff of the school that I didn’t see cabinetmaking there so I wasn’t interested,” he said. “I started looking for an apprenticeship.”

While looking, Philippe was offered an opportunity to attend a school two hours away from his hometown.

“Life is about opportunities,” he says, “but it’s also not being afraid to take the train when it’s going full steam.”

Becoming a Cabinetmaker

Before being accepted into the school, Philippe had to complete a series of tasks and projects. Philippe wonderfully shares that experience in an essay in “With All Precision Possible.”

In short, that summer he found a cabinetmaker who agreed to take him under his wing. In addition to helping the cabinetmaker with odd jobs, he worked through his tasks and projects, the cabinetmaker serving as mentor.

For his first task, Philippe dressed up the face and edges of rough lumber, making it perfectly equal in thickness and length, with hand tools only. Next his mentor taught him how to cut dovetails and he built a jewelry box and bread basket out of mahogany and cherry, using a set of provided blueprints for reference. He also learned how to sharpen chisels and hand plane blades.

This, from his essay:

That summer was an eye-opener in many respects and it cemented my desire to work with wood in some capacity. When fall arrived, I enrolled in my new school as a cabinetmaker. The school was training young fellows like me to be ready to enter the workforce quickly and thus the training was more focused on knowledge and use of equipment than on hand skills. After a summer of working with my hands, I balked. Two weeks into the school year I was certain that this was not the path I was seeking. I asked for an audience with the school director and shared him my dilemma. I told him I wanted to work with my hands and chairmaking would work better for me. I asked to be transferred and bid farewell to cabinetmaking. It is amazing what you can do when you are very motivated and stubborn.

I began my education in chairmaking the following week and while machinery was part of the training, there were many parts of a chair that could only be accomplished by hand, and that suited me just fine. So for the next two years, I learned the art of chairmaking, “industrial style,” which also included making beds and end/pier tables. There was a pretty straightforward approach to accomplishing such tasks. Now I was able to read a set of blueprints and from it, trace all the required contours and profiles used to cut out the necessary chair parts from the lumber. Thinking back, I am still amazed that in that class, all of us could produce an armchair in 24 hours, ready for finishing.

At the end of two years I had a diploma in my pocket and some experience under my belt. Now I could return to my mentor’s workshop and turn on and use all the power tools to my heart’s content, something I had earned and did proudly. I had a great summer in the little workshop that year.

During that summer, a friend told him about the esteemed École Boulle in Paris, which has offered higher education in applied arts and artistic crafts, including cabinetmaking, marquetry and restoration work, since 1886. To enroll, Philippe first had to pass a two-day exam, which included creating a full-size set of technical drawings with accurate dimensions of a Louis XV-style chair. He was accepted.

“It was another world,” Philippe says. “You’re learning about a lot of things, all around.”

After two years at École Boulle, he worked out a deal with the director. He would come back a third year, tuition free, and help fabricate everything that came out of the design workshop.

“That was very cool because they were doing some very interesting stuff, combining not only wood but metal and plastic,” he says.

Now he was firmly planted in hands-on learning and he loved it. But the dream situation was short-lived.

Mobilier National

A couple of weeks into his third year at École Boulle, a teacher told him about chairmaking job openings at Mobilier National, that manages the furniture of the French State, such as the furnishing of ministries and embassies, its storage, its restorations, and its design, notably with the Research and Creation Workshop. It was an opportunity Philippe couldn’t pass up. So he and a friend decided to apply. But first, they had to pass an exam.

When they arrived, they were given an armchair and a stack of wood. On day one, they were tasked with drawing the chair to scale. On day two, they were tasked with using their own drawings to each build an armchair in 24 hours. They both were hired.

Philippe worked there for three years.

“It’s like the history of France in all kinds of objects,” he says. “It was incredible. I saw all the campaign traveling furniture of the Napoleon War.”

Here, for example, Philippe worked on chairs stamped by famous chairmakers of the 18th century. The “users,” often high-ranking government officials, didn’t want reproductions. They wanted original pieces, signed and perfectly restored. It was all cyclical, too. For example, a canopy bed might be used by the president of France while elected for seven years and then returned to be left in storage.

Philippe questioned the restoration work at times, ripping off nails, redoing this, fixing that.

“But there’s so much, that you don’t even consider when there will never be enough one day,” he says. “That’s the problem. You value it differently.”

After three years, Philippe realized the job came to him too young. He could envision himself as head of the section in which he worked, but he wanted more out of life.

“If you stay in a job like that young, you are going to lose everything you have to offer,” he says. “There is no room to express yourself. There’s no room to grow. It’s very limited.”

Philippe went back to South France. He felt boxed in. In France, work is quite compartmentalized and segmented, he says, to the point of being rigid. He knew if he stayed that trying anything new would be complicated.

“So in 1987, I took my bag and went to the U.S.,” he says.

An Internship at the Smithsonian

“In the U.S., I realized quickly that first I had to learn English,” he says. “And I had to think out of the box because I could not just be a chairmaker. If you’re going to be a chairmaker in the U.S., you’re only going to be a chairmaker if you make things that are exceptional. You’re going to find a clientele that wants your stuff and that’s it, but that’s going to be rare.”

Eventually he landed an interview at the Smithsonian Museum’s Conservation Analytical Laboratory (now called the Museum Conservation Institute). The job – the museum’s first wooden objects intern. At the time, Don Williams worked in the lab and Mark Williams was head of the lab.

“I remember the interview in the meeting room,” Philippe says. “I was at the end of the table. I was shaking like a leaf. I knew 200 words of English. I had a little portfolio of photographs. And all these heads of all these sections were bombarding me with questions. It was freaking me out.”

He got the internship.

In his first week, he ended up in New Orleans at a convention for conservators from around the world. His eyes were opened to how other countries view the roles of conservator, restorer and curator. In the U.S., he says, you respect the stain as much as you respect a brand-new piece.

“You respect the history because everything is telling you something,” he says. “We’re just only passing information. We are not here to change information. That’s the big difference. You restore to have something look good. In the U.S., you encapsulate this moment and pass it along. And you remember that the best is always the enemy of the good.”

One day at the Smithsonian he saw someone had left three volumes of Roubo on his desk. Don and Mark asked Philippe if he could translate them.

“I said no. I won’t. It’s impossible,” Philippe says. “I didn’t know enough English at the time and I didn’t think I would have been able to manage that at all.”

While protesting, Philippe opened up one of the volumes and found a plate that shocked him. It was an illustration of a workshop and it looked identical to his workshop in Paris.

“It was and still is exactly the same,” he says. “It’s a row of workbenches. Windows on the left, big windows, floor to ceiling. The same spacing between each bench, the same lineup. On the right you have space to have small sawhorses or your glue pot. And you have an equipment room on the other side. When I saw these pictures, I couldn’t believe it. We haven’t moved from that yet. To me, it was unbelievable.”

In the beginning, Philippe worked closely with Mark, who hired and supervised him. When Don took over as head of the lab, he and Philippe worked well together, connecting over a shared taste in music.

No longer stuck in the role of chairmaker, Philippe decided to spread his wings even more.

Tryon Palace

In 1990, Philippe found a new opportunity as a conservator at Tryon Palace in New Bern, North Carolina. He enjoyed this work for a while, but eventually realized he was missing something.

“I was lacking communication with what I was doing because those objects, they never talk back to you,” he says. “It was a bit too quiet.”

He switched gears to technical services manager, taking care of the well-being of its collections and buildings and its day-to-day operations. He worked up to the role of deputy director, which involved more finance work and human resources, and then helped build the N.C. History Center.  In 2014, he was named executive director, a role he had been filling since the 2012 death of the previous director.

During this time, Philippe realized that all of his education, hands-on experiences and exposures to new opportunities had prepared him well for such new and varied work.

“Suddenly, you have all these resources that help you find a solution,” he says. “It’s like when you are building case furniture and you have something that doesn’t work, you find a solution. There is something, a mechanism in place that – click – it goes in. If you’re in a field that’s not quite yours, you use your mechanical skills to resolve stuff. It’s in place. You have learned how to make it work. You pull on your resources. I was glad to have my training because I can visualize things in three dimensions. I can see things very quickly.”

Philippe has found his professional journey gratifying.

“I was able to start from a wooden block but it’s not a block anymore,” he says. “It becomes whatever you want it to become. But you still have this hands-on quick understanding and then up, up, up and you work with people. It just happened to be that way. Primarily, I was able to open my mind. And it’s not always easy. But you make a mistake and you start again.”

Working on Roubo

Over the years, Philippe and Don kept in touch, somewhat sporadically. One weekend, Don called Philippe and told him he had started the translation of Roubo’s books. Don once again asked Philippe for help. This time, Philippe agreed.

Don asked immediately if he’d like to be named as an author.

“I said, Don, I don’t know. Send me stuff. If you like what I do, that’s fine with me. If you don’t like what I do, don’t put me on. So that’s the way it ended up being,” Philippe says. “I had no expectations. I was just doing it to help and for the fun of reading historical documents.”

They found a rhythm. Don and Michele completed their work, then sent everything to Philippe to look at it from the perspective of someone whose native language was French and who had a breadth of knowledge in French historical craftsmanship.

The first book took a while. Philippe worked on it every night after work, for two to three hours. The second one was a lot faster – it took Philippe about six months to complete.

After the first edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” was printed, Philippe joined Don at Woodworking in America 2013 in Cincinnati for a book signing.

“I thought I was on another planet,” Philippe says. “I said, ‘What the heck is going on?’ It’s one of those feelings like you don’t know where you’ve landed. It was funny. Don gave a lecture. I bumped into people like Roy Underhill. I ended up staying with Megan [Fitzpatrick] in her house. She was trying to finish her house. Is she still? I’m sure she is, with all the work she puts in at Lost Art Press. Anyway, Don and I got to see all the beautiful furniture she’s made. That was a lot of fun.  It was all very strange but it was one of those moments in life that stays always engraved. You have these beautiful vignettes in life where you cross paths with people.”

Philippe is now back in France, in Saint Nazaire, a small town of about 2,500 people. He’s 20 minutes away from Spain, surrounded by mountains and the Mediterranean Sea.

He’s working with Michele and Don on new Roubo translations.

“That team is very relaxed,” he says. “This is the type of project you don’t get ready for. You can’t work ahead of time. You just wait for it to fall in your lap and then you go.”

‘Life is to Discover Yourself’

Having spent many years living and working in France, and many years living and working in the U.S., Philippe finds the differences quite interesting.

“In the U.S., there’s this quest for success and not being afraid of it,” he says. “There is a lot more freedom available where you pursue things or dream of things.”

It’s an attitude of, Why not? Let’s try, he says.

“What I did in the U.S. professionally is impossible to do in France. You could do it in France, but only if you had the right diplomas. In the U.S., I was not judged by my diploma. I was judged by my character, by my work ethics, by all these things that we should be judged on.”

These days, Philippe had rediscovered the joy of model making (with a nod to his childhood) and he’s tapping into more creative work, creating folk art. He works in a room that is a bit less than 10 square meters, with a tabletop as a workbench. He’s content.

“I’m very curious by nature,” he says.

For example, when making a model sailboat, he also made the sail.

“I pulled out a sewing machine and I sewed the sail because the process was a mystery to me,” he says. “I’m attracted to all those things that are new to me. I have a desire to surprise myself and discover other matter.”

He’s also being mindful about sharing what he’s learned over the years.

“That is also something that is more common in the U.S. than here,” he says. “Here, people retire and are finished. A lot is lost, really. The mentality is really different. In the U.S., when I was working in the museum, we had a lot of volunteers. They don’t want to just stop and do nothing. They come and share their stuff, they participate in life. I don’t know. It’s another way of looking at things. I’m not saying one way is better than the other, but for me, I was glad to be exposed to that way of looking at things because it made me bigger, bigger in looking at things and accepting things and opening up my mind. That’s what I like.”

Living life this way has required him to make some hard choices, he says.

“I’ve learned when you go down river, it’s always easier to go with the flow,” he says. “There’s always something you’re going to be able to catch on the side of the river to make a pause. When you try to go against the current, that’s where you’re drowning and you’re missing all the opportunities.

“You can fight all the time but life is going to take you where it’s going to take you. It’s up for you to go for it, to be quick to accept and change. And you are always part of it. That’s the beauty of it. No matter what happened, you are part of it – 50 percent is your choice. The rest is to accept that you have decided to do this or not. That’s the difficult part. But life is short. Life is to be lived. Life is to discover yourself.”

Meet the Author: Michele Pietryka-Pagán                                                    

Posted on by Kara Uhl

Editor’s Note: Michele Pietryka-Pagán is the French-to-English translator on the three-person team dedicated to bringing André-Jacob Roubo’s work to life. We have Michele, along with Don Williams and Philippe LaFargue, to thank for “With All Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture” and “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.”

These volumes are no longer in stock as we’re making room for new deluxe editions of each. The deluxe edition of “With All Precision Possible” will be for sale later this month and we plan to offer a deluxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” soon.

Michele and Philippe have also completed the translations of more volumes of Roubo focusing on interior carpentry, garden carpentry and carriages. (You can read more about that on Don’s blog, here.)

Michele Pietryka-Pagán grew up in Vermont, the eldest of six children, born to native Vermonters.

“My parents were children of the depression, and so we grew up with a heavy dose of ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without,’” Michele says. “That’s a common Vermont philosophy. My parents were also educated, and they wanted all of us to be educated, too. There was always a subtext of do-it-yourself, and that included putting yourself through college, so we did.”

Michele’s dad was a mechanical engineer who liked to, and knew how to, fix most anything. In the early 1960s, Michele’s parents bought a 19th-century  house in Bennington, Vermont. It had no kitchen cabinets, so Michele’s dad drove to the lumberyard, bought lumber and taught himself how to make the base and upper cabinets. It was her first exposure to home renovation, helping her mom to wallpaper the old, horsehair plaster walls.

Michele’s mom was a teacher who stayed home to care for the family until Michele’s senior year of high school. When Michele was young, her mom taught her hand skills – sewing, embroidery and knitting.

“She taught me everything she could so maybe I would survive the next depression,” she says. “One of my earliest memories is getting a set of seven tea towels for Christmas one year, one for every day of the week, with a different motif to embroider on each one.”

As she grew up, Michele bought more and more complex patterns. By high school, she was able to make her own prom dress, and by the time she graduated from college, she made a friend’s wedding dress.

While Michele was growing up, her dad changed careers and became a high school industrial arts teacher and, later, a mechanical engineering professor at Vermont Technical College. Because of her dad’s position, Michele’s tuition at the University of Vermont was free. There she learned most of what she knows about textile science, in addition to perfecting her hand skills with fabric – turning 2D pieces of fabric into 3D garments.

“I had a real classical training in dressmaking and design,” she says.

Some of it she already knew – how to sew a straight seam and put in a zipper. She had whole semesters where she just studied tailoring or fabric draping. She spent two semesters studying textile science. She also learned how to make her own mannequin, which later came in handy when making mannequins for garments and costumes in museum exhibits. She graduated in 1973.

“Then, of course, the Bicentennial happened in 1976,” she says. “If you talk to a lot of museum folks of my generation today, we all got bitten really hard by the historic preservation movements that came about when the bicentennial celebration happened.”

Michele, John and Gracie, their terrier mix, today

In the mid-1980s, Michele earned her master’s degree in textile studies at the University of Connecticut. It was during this time that she met her husband, John Pagán, who was in the U.S. Naval Submarine Force. They married in 1984. Together they traveled up and down the East Coast, following John’s assignments both at sea, and at the Pentagon. In 1987 they moved to Washington, D.C., where they lived on and off for nearly 30 years.

Conservation & translation

While living in Washington, Michele and her husband hosted international students, researchers and writers. They had a particularly good experience with a young man from France, who stayed for a couple of summers. In part because of this, Michele began studying French in the evenings through a program with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Michele also studied textile conservation at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, and became one of their Research Associates. While there she helped a senior textile conservator with a small French translation project.

Don Williams, who was the senior furniture conservator at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, heard about her translation work. He had a couple of books about French carpentry written by an 18th-century woodworker named André Roubo that he wanted translated. He asked Michele if she’d be interested in volunteering.

“I naively said, ‘Sure! Why not?’,” she says. “For the next seven years, while most people were watching some sitcom on TV at night, I was sitting at my big dining room table surrounded by six or seven French-English dictionaries, a couple of them dating back to the 18th century,” she says.

Language changes over time. When Michele would get stuck trying to find an appropriate word in a 20th-century dictionary, she moved on to her 19th-century dictionaries, and then to her 18th-century dictionaries. She worked one sentence at a time: one paragraph, no matter how long it was, was always one sentence.

First, Michele would read the paragraph-long sentence and circle all the words she didn’t know. In the beginning, this ended up being about every third word because she’s not a woodworker nor a native French speaker.

“… So then I had to translate word by word, each word that I didn’t know,” she says. “I had to find the word in one of those dictionaries and then break up the paragraph into smaller sentences. That alone was a challenge because if I chopped up a paragraph into, say, three sentences, then I had to go back, after the translation, and see if the whole thing made any sense.”

Michele and Don, 2018.

With time, the work became much faster. Today, Michele can look at one of Roubo’s French paragraphs and typically type it into English, having to look up hardly anything.

“That’s how much I have improved over 18 years of doing this,” she says. “And now, of course, if there is a word that I don’t know, I just use Reverso. And the beauty of it is that it not only tells you what the word is, but it also puts it into context for you. So that’s really been lovely. But my French conversation still stinks!”

Michele and Philippe LaFargue, a native French speaker, work on the translations.

“My translated text then goes to Don, who adds contemporary information for today’s woodworkers,” she says. “Roubo was a master woodworker at the end of the 18th century in France. Some of that information translates to today, but not all of it. Don’s image of the project from the very beginning was to make this information as tangible and accessible as possible. Then the work goes to Philippe, who makes sure that my translation works with what Don is trying to say, for American woodworkers.”

Still learning – & teaching

Michel and John’s house in Dorset, Vermont.

John, Michele’s husband, retired in 2015. In May 2016, they bought and began restoring an 1825 farmhouse in Dorset, Vermont. It’s something Michele and John are well-accustomed to, having bought and restored four old townhouses while living on Capitol Hill. “All the homes on Capitol Hill are old, and they ALL needed a new furnace!”

Michele and a neighbor recently spent about five years researching 42 homes in their little village of East Dorset. In July 2025, the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation met and reviewed their application, calling for East Dorset to be named a historic district. It was approved.

“It was a long haul but definitely worth it,” she says.

More recently, Michele has been active with the Vermont Sampler Initiative.

“It’s a national search for 19th-century schoolgirl needlework samplers,” she says. “We’re trying to find them, document them, photograph them, analyze them and research the genealogy of all the girls who made these samplers and put them online. It gives me goosebumps. Nobody has ever done this before! Here we are, in the 21st century, and nobody has ever looked at a schoolgirl sampler, read her name, her birthdate, maybe her town all stitched there, and asked questions. Who were her parents? What kind of people were they? Did they have any role in making this country that we call the USA?”

Since November 2022, Michele and her team have found and documented more than 770 Vermont samplers. In 2025, in cooperation with the Vermont 250th Commemoration of the start of the American Revolution, Michele is coordinating a driving tour of 20 locations all over Vermont where visitors can stop and see exhibits of 19th-century schoolgirl samplers that all tie back to the American Revolution in some way.

In addition to research, for the past five summers Michele also served as a presenter at the Bennington Museum’s Summer Teachers Institute. There she teaches teachers seeking additional accreditation about how to use museum artifacts in their lesson plans.

“There’s nothing more gratifying than having an audience full of teachers, because when you’re teaching teachers, they are absorbing every single word you say,” she says.

Whether it’s translating, researching or teaching, Michele is all in. Case in point: She tore up part of her own meadow and planted flax, wanting to know more about how our ancestors planted, harvested, spun and wove it into linen. She brought the flax into her classes, along with different kinds of fiber for the teachers to observe under a microscope.

“This gives my life new meaning,” she says. “It’s a new chapter. I’m still really happy to be associated with Don and the Roubo project. What’s really special about working with Don is that he has so much respect for women: His wife and two daughters have raised him right!  Occasionally, Philippe will call from France – we have never actually met – but I can tell he’s a really great guy, too. So, this has been a truly wonderful project to be part of.”

The Roubo project is also giving back.

“My husband and I decided to use some of the royalty monies from the sales of the Roubo books to start an endowment at the Bennington Museum,” Michele says. “The endowment pays for one high school student per year to spend the summer working with the staff at the museum, for about eight weeks. We are into the fifth year of summer interns whom we have funded, and all we ask is that the student write us a little synopsis of what they did at the museum all summer. Since we don’t have children, this is our part of ‘touching the future,’ as Sally Ride, the astronaut, said.”

Despite living different lives, there’s commonality in Michele and Don’s work. In working on the translations, Michele says she was able to help Don better convey the antique processes and mindset for creating wooden furniture.

“Don and I are both conservators,” she says. “We both believe in historic preservation. We both believe in transmitting our cultural heritage from the past and making it accessible to today’s students. That’s why I enjoy making textile history from the past accessible to today’s teachers and their students. Don and I did the same thing in just two different specialties. We’re both educators. We’re both passing on information from the past to today’s and tomorrow’s students, teachers and historic preservationists.”

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Closeout Sale on Our Roubo Volumes

Posted on by Lost Art Press

We are closing out the last 400 (or so) copies of our two translations of A-J Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier” in order to make room for new editions of these books.

The savings are significant. Act quickly to avoid disappointment.

“With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture” is now $21 (on sale from $63).

“To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” is now $13 (on sale from $57).

We are closing out both of these books to make way for deluxe editions with improved paper and images (indeed, things can get better over time in some situations).

If you have ever wanted to own translations of these earth-moving historical texts, but you couldn’t justify the cost, this is your chance.

— Christopher Schwarz

Roubo on How to Saw Veneer

Posted on by fitz
Plate 278. The Way to Split Veneer Wood, and Its Explanation

The following is excerpted from “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry,” translated by By Donald C. Williams, Michele Pietryka-Pagán & Philippe Lafargue. It is the first English-language translation of the most important woodworking book of the 18th century.

While the title of this work implies that it is about marquetry alone, that is not the case. “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” covers a wide range of topics of interest to woodworkers who are interested in hand-tool woodworking or history.

In addition to veneer and marquetry, this volume contains sections on grinding, sharpening, staining, finishing, wood selection, a German workbench, clock-case construction, engraving and casting brasses.

But most of all, “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” provides a window into the woodworking world of the 18th century, a world that is both strangely familiar and foreign.

Roubo laments the decline of the craft in the 18th century. He decries the secrecy many masters employed to protect craft knowledge. He bemoans the cheapening of both goods and the taste of customers.

And he speaks to the reader as a woodworker who is talking to a fellow woodworker. Unlike many chroniclers of his time, Roubo was a journeyman joiner (later a master) who interviewed his fellow tradesmen to produce this stunning work. He engraved many of the plates himself. And he produced this work after many years of study.

As the wood that one uses for cabinetmaking is for the most part very expensive, because it costs roughly 10 sols up to 30 sols, and sometimes even one crown per pound, according to the different types of wood, we have great interest in using these woods sparingly; that is why instead of making furniture or other pieces of cabinetry in solid wood, we have tried to execute splitting [sawing] wood into laminates, or very thin sheets, that one applies on the furniture cases made of ordinary wood.

It is not the carpenter-cabinetmakers who split [saw] their wood, but the workers [sawyers] who do only this work, and who saw not only for the cabinetmakers, but also for the musical instrument makers, and generally all those who use thin wood. These workers or sawyers are paid by the pound, that is to say, according to the weight of the piece of wood that they use, including the waste-wood and sawdust, rendering the wood close to two-thirds more expensive, which makes a piece made in this manner very important.

Veneer wood is split [sawn] at about a thickness of 1 line at most [1/12″ to 1/14″]; when one wants to spare it, one makes from 10 to 11 leaves from a thumb-thickness [inch], which is worthless because even before the veneer is polished, it has left only a half-blade of thickness [1/24″ to 1/32″], which is then reduced almost to nothing when the piece is finished; it is absolutely necessary to avoid making veneers this thin, although that is used a lot at the present. When one wants to cut up a piece of wood to make a veneer, one begins by choosing the side of the log that allows for the easiest sawing, the goal being to orient the wood for the best advantage, and to yield the largest sheets of the veneer; then one puts the piece of wood in the vise, and with a standing saw [a saw to be used while standing, and a vise designed to facilitate that action], one saws it to a thickness that one judges appropriate (which I am going to explain, after having provided the description of the bench or vise with a standing saw, and of the saw appropriate for this task).

The saw appropriate for cutting wood from India, which we name also the saw with vise, Figs. 1 and 2 [to increase or decrease the tension on the blade] is a little bit similar to the saw for cutting used by the woodworking builders [often known in the modern era as a frame saw]. It is composed of two verticals and of two crosswise or crossbeam elements, of which the ends project out and are round ed, so that the two sawyers can hold the saw easily. The middle of these crosspieces is convex on the outside, in order to give them more strength, and that they not bend while one increases the tension on the saw blade.

The inside [interior] of the vise saw is from 15 to 18 thumbs [inches] wide [or approximately 9 inches on either side of the blade], is about 3 feet long, as measured from within the crosspieces or support piece. The blade of the saw has a 4–thumbs [inches] depth, at least, and is held at each end by a frame of iron, through which passes the crosspieces of the saw, or, better said, of its chassis. These frames of iron, represented by Figs. 4, 5, 8 and 9, are made of iron plate, and the largest possible, so that the saw cannot turn easily, and one tightens a nut to that above, for putting there a screw a b, Figs. 4 and 5, which serves to control the tension of the saw blade.

On the outside of the cross-members one insets a steel contact plate attached with some screws, which prevents the pressure of the screw of the frame to not ruin anything nor to make any holes. See Fig. 3.

The blade of the saw, as I just said, is 4 thumbs [inches] size at least, tapering barely toward the back [away from the teeth]. We do not put a set on these sorts of saws, because that would eat up the wood excessively with an unnecessarily wide kerf, and one takes great care that the teeth be perfectly straight on the horizontal, and that their teeth be also perfectly equal in height, so that they grab all equally, and that they do not chatter, resulting in uneven thickness of the wood, which is also to be feared, which ruins so many sheets of veneer. The teeth of these saws should be spaced equally, about 5 to 6 lines from one tooth to the next one at least, and should be positioned in such a way that the bottom [what we now call the tip] of each tooth is level with one another, because being so arranged, they are less subject to become dull, which would happen unfailingly if they were made ordinarily, as is seen that almost all wood from India is hard, and consequently causes more resistance to the teeth of the saw. See Figs. 6 and 7, which represent one part of the saw blade viewed from the front and side, half-size.

The standing saw vise, represented in Fig. 11, is one type of small bench, about 3 to 3.5 feet long, by 2 feet high, at the base of which one puts the vise, which serves to hold in place the piece that one wishes to saw.

In order for this vise to be solid [a stout twin-screw face vise], it is good that the brace [the jaw] A, Fig. 11, have about 6 thumbs [inches] thickness, as well as the top of the bench, in which the screws enter,
which to be good, should have at least 2.5 to 3 thumbs [inches] in thickness, and the threads be long enough so that when there is a piece of wood8 to 10 thumbs [inches] thickness placed in the vise, there remains at least enough length of the screw in the bench, as observed in this figure. As this bench is very short, and is subject to vibration by the movement of the saw, one loads stones on the bottom shelf to make it more solid; but I believe it would be better to make the legs of the bench long enough to be anchored to the floor of the shop, then one makes a hole in front of the bench to set in the piece of wood to be sawn in order to not extend upwards more than 3 feet above the top of the vise, locating it thus both for the comfort of the sawyers and for maximizing the yield of the piece being sawn. Not all the standing saw vises are part of an overall bench, such as the one represented here, in Figs. 10 and 11; this is why ordinary vises attached to a little bench are less solid than making them as I propose here.

When one wishes to saw with the vise, one begins by placing the piece to saw in the vise, of which the screws tighten with an iron lever, that one removes after being worked, so that it is not in the way; then, with an ordinary saw, one begins to mark all the lines to be sawn on the end of the workpiece, just up to 2 to 3 lines deep [3/16″], then one uses the frame saw, Fig. 1, which is guided horizontally by two men, observing the advantageous slight incline on the side of the tooth rake, and of the lifting up of the blade while pulling back, so as to relieve it, and that it not bind in the wood, or at least that the sawdust does not obstruct it. See Figs. 10 and 11, which represents a vise press upright, viewed in perspective, with the sawyers located as they should be.

When one saws with a vise, one begins with the outside edge of the log, so that the first sheets sawn bend away from the log and facilitate the passage of the saw, which could not be the case if one sawed in the middle; as one does when one saws large pieces of wood being used by carpenters or by ordinary woodworkers, given that the frame saw blade is very thin, and that it has no set. Sawyers at a vise do not lay out or mark a line on the side of the piece that they wish to saw; but after having begun on the end with an ordinary saw, they continue the rest by eye, which they do very well, for the most part; they are very sure to saw their veneers not only very straight, but still perfectly of equal thickness, as well. See Fig. 11, which represents the cut of the bench or upright vise saw, and a piece of wood sawn into sheets just up to the middle.

To finish what this looks like at the cutting of wood appropriate to the cabinetmaker I have represented in Fig. 12, a saw named the carving saw, which serves to cut up not only hard wood, whether wood with the grain or cross-grain, or standing wood, but also coral, ivory and mother-of-pearl. The framework of these sorts of saws is all iron, of which the upper branch is widened on the outside, so that one can adapt the blade and set it as one judges appropriate, which is done in the following manner.

After having pierced a hole in the blade of the saw, b, corresponding with that of the lower arm of the frame of the saw, you put this one [arm], and the one that is opposite, in a vise or other thing capable of bending them [squeezing them together], in a manner that they tend to meet one against the other, and tightens them as much as is judged appropriate, to give the saw all the tension necessary; then the blade of the saw, being stopped at point b, one makes it enter in the upper arm of the frame, and one traces the place for the hole at point a, which one pierces to place there a peg; this being done, one again bends the arms of the frame, just until it gives liberty to pass the peg below, and which serves to hold the peg in place, as one can see in this figure.

The blades for these sorts of saws are very thin, and one does not give them a set, so they have a very narrow kerf and lose less material, and they pass easily; one thins them on the back [away from the teeth], which one does with a file that one passes down the length just until they are thinned enough as one judges appropriate; then one rubs them with sand to remove the unevenness that the filing could have made; this operation is called “demaigrir” [thinning], a worker’s term.

Mid 18th-century Composition of Wood Dyes

Posted on by fitz
Plate 300

The following is excerpted from “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry,” by André-Jacob Roubo, translated by Donald C. Williams, Michele Pietryka-Pagán and Philippe Lafargue.

The different Compositions of Dyes appropriate for dyeing Woods, and how to use them

The tinting [dyeing or staining] of woods is of great importance for cabinetmakers, because it is with its help that one can give to woods the different colors, which are necessary for representing all sorts of objects, such as fruits, flowers, animals, etc. However, cabinetmakers always make a great secret of the composition of their dyes in order to preserve exclusivity, and not to increase the number of workers in their trade. From that circumstance comes the fact that most of the compositions that the ancient cabinetmakers used have not been passed on to us, or are presently badly imitated. Those being used presently are defective, or even if they are good, cannot be perfected given that those who possess them hide the process. They keep this information secret not only from their colleagues but even from those for whom the theory could be useful in perfecting the composition of their dyes. This would be much more advantageous than the enjoyment of maintaining a secret, which is not a big thing, but which, even when it is perfectly well known to us, leaves us still to regret the loss of the method of Jean de Veronne, who tinted woods with boiling dyes and oils that penetrated them. This would be a very helpful thing to know, the research of which would be a worthy undertaking for some of our scholars. It is highly wished that one could find the means to use the chemicals having a good tint in the dyeing of woods, because their colors would be more durable. Sadly, the colored parts of most of these chemicals are too thick to penetrate the interior of woods, which is absolutely necessary, so that when working with tinted woods they are all found to be of uniform color throughout their entire thickness and the surface.

That is why in the description of the woods, without the means to which I would like to know the procedure to accomplish the perfect tint, I will explain only ordinary procedures to cabinetmakers, to which I will add some of my own experiences, which is still a long ways from attaining the perfection of which this part can be capable.

The five primitive colors are, as I said above, blue, yellow, red, taupe [brown] and black. Each of these colors is given by different chemicals, which, when mixed together, give the second or composite colors.

The blue appropriate for tinting woods is made with indigo, diluted in oil of vitriol [also known as sulfuric acid], and then put in a sufficient quantity of water.

Yellow is made with barberry, yellow earth and saffron mixed together, or even simply from gaude [this plant, Reseda luteola, is known as weld].

Red is made from the boiling of wool, or even a concoction of Brasilwood mixed with alum.

Taupe is made with walnut husk.

Black is made with the wood of the Indies, the gall nuts and iron sulfate.

Before entering into the detail of the composition of different stains, I am going to give a general idea of the chemicals of which they are composed, so that the cabinetmakers may be less subject to being fooled when they buy them.

Indigo is a type of ash of a deep blue, provided by the leaves of a plant that grows in the Americas and Indostan, and which they sell in little pieces. For it to be good, it must be medium-hard, so that it floats on water, so it is inflammable and of a beautiful blue or deep violet color. Its interior should be strewn with little silver-colored spangles, and appear reddish when rubbed with a fingernail. Indigo is preferred over all other chemicals for staining woods because it is a powder of extremely fine and granular pieces, which are easily introduced into the pores of the woods.

Oil of vitriol or sulfuric acid is the final spirit that one gets from vitriol. This acidic liquor should be very concentrated and be absolutely free of all aqueous parts to be of a beautiful blue color, as I will speak more of later.

Barberry is a little bush of which the fruits, and the bark of the roots are stained in yellow. That from Candie [island off the coast of Crete] has a very yellow wood, and passes for the best.

Woad [this cannot be woad that produces a blue dye] is a rather common plant in France. One boils it in water to extract a yellow liquid, which mixed with a bit of alum, tints very well. Dyers prefer that one, which is the most spare [meaning thinnest] and of a rosy color.

One also dyes in yellow with the yellow wood of which I spoke above page 777. Yellow earth is nothing other than yellow ochre, used by painters.

Saffron is a plant that grows in France, especially in Gatinois [western part of France]. It is the pistil of the saffron flower, which gives these little reddish filaments, or better said, orange, which they sell under the name of saffron, which gives a dye of a golden yellow. For saffron to be good, it should be fresh, of a pungent odor, of a brilliant color and when touched it should seem oily and should stick to the hands.

Alum is a fossil salt and mineral, which is used much in dyeing, whether to set up the materials to be stained or whether for fixing the colors [as a mordant], which it retains all the particles by its astrin-gent quality. The best is that of Rome, which is white in color, and is transparent, a bit like crystal.

Liquor decanted from boiled wool is sold by the wool merchants. In boiling this wool, one gets a decoction of the color rose, which is more or less deep, according to how much water is used to scour the wool, proportional with its quantity.

I spoke up above of Brasilwood, page 771. I will content myself to say here that the decoction of this wood gives off a clear red color, tending toward the orange, and that one deepens its color by adding a bit of alum. Brasilwood from Fernambouc is the best, and they sell it all chopped up at the spice merchants, who sell it by the pound.

The husk of walnuts is nothing more than the first wrapping of these nuts, which one takes off before they are perfectly mature, and which one boils in water to extract a brownish or taupey tint.

Indian Wood, of which I spoke on page 777, gives off a concoction of a deep red, which one stains in black, and when one mixes with alum it stains in violet.

Nut gall is a type of excretion that is found on the tender shoots of a type of oak named “Rouvre.” The most highly esteemed nut gall comes from the Levant [the name given to the countries on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean]. The best ones are those that are the heaviest, and where the surface is thorny. There are both green and black ones, both of which work equally to stain in black.

Ferrous sulfate is a type of vitriol that is found in copper mines. It is the most powerful of the acids, it corrodes iron and copper, and it etches the soft parts with an infinite number of small holes, into which the dye is introduced. Ferrous sulfate is also named Roman vitriol or English vitriol, according to whether it comes from one or the other countries. We make some in France that is, they say, as good as the others. The color of ferrous sulfate [known also as green vitriol] is of a light green: it should be neat and shiny.

Verdigris also works well as a wood dye. It is the green rust scraped from copper sheets. For it to be good, it should be dry, pure, of a deep green and filled with white spots.

There you have a bit of a description of the ingredients commonly used for staining/dyeing woods.
All that remains is to give the manner of making use of them.

The Way of Staining Wood Blue

The preparation of blue with indigo and oil of vitriol [sulfuric acid] is done in two ways, namely, hot and cold. Blue for wood is prepared cold in the following manner:

you take 4 ounces of oil of vitriol of the best quality, that is to say, that it is deprived of all aqueous parts, which you pour into a pint-size bottle, with 1 ounce of indigo reduced to a very fine powder. Then you fill the bottle with water, at least nearly so, and you bottle it very carefully, and you seal the cork with wax. you let it infuse for five to six weeks, at the end of which you can use this stain that will be more or less strong, by putting in as much water as you judge appropriate, always ob-serving to add a bit of oil of vitriol, so the dye will be fixed better. When the dye is to the degree of strength that you need, you put it in a stoneware or glazed earthenware vessel, and you soak the wood in it until it is totally penetrated, which sometimes requires 15 days and even one month of time, according to the hardness and thickness of the wood. The wood can hardly have a thickness of more than one line [1/12″].

Cabinetmakers ordinarily use a stoneware butter pot for putting the wood into the dye, which is very convenient because the shape of this vase enables one to put in rather large pieces, without the need of having a very great quantity of dye.

It is very easy to know when the interior of the wood is penetrated, given that you only have to cut a small piece of the wood about 2 to 3 lines from its end. When the pieces that you want to dye cannot be cut like this, you put with them another piece of the same quality, with which you test the degree of penetration of the other pieces.

The Way of Dyeing in Yellow

Cabinetmakers tint in yellow with barberry, with yellow earth and with saffron, which they boil together. This being done, they soak the wood pieces until they are totally stained. The proportion of these chemicals is 2 liters [in this case the French word refers to “litron,” which is about 79 percent of a modern liter, so 2 modern liters is a much larger quantity] of barberry, 6 “sols” [a French penny] of yellow earth, and 4 “sols” of saffron.

A concoction of woad gives a very beautiful yellow of a good tint, and you soak the wood as normal. When this concoction is added to a bit of verdigris, you have a sulfurous yellow color. Saffron infused in grain alcohol gives a very beautiful golden yellow.


The Way to Dye in Red

Red is normally made with brasilwood, which one boils with 6 sols of alum for each pound of wood. This red is a false tint because it is more orange than red. you can substitute the boiling-liqueur from wool, which gives a very beautiful red, leaning toward rose, which one makes deeper by passing the pieces that you have stained into the liqueur of the mixture of Brasilwood mixed with alum. This makes a very beautiful red, more or less deep, depending on whether you leave the pieces of wood more or less a long time in the dye bath of Brasilwood.

Dyeing with decanting liqueur is done very easily. One only needs to boil some wool dyed to this effect, just until it makes a beautiful red concoction. Avoid boiling too much, because the wool will take back the color that it discharged at first.

The proportion of the liquor of wool to be decanted is 1 pound to 4 pints of water for the first decanting, to which one can add a second, even a third, until the wool renders no more color. The concoction of Brasilwood without alum gives a yellowish red, which is sometimes attractive, and is named “Capucine.”

The concoction of Indian Wood is very red, but it makes a blackish stain, which makes a very beautiful violet when mixed with alum from Rome, as I will speak of it later.

How to Dye Taupe [Brown], Black and Grey

Taupe dye is made with a concoction of walnut husk, which can be more or less strong, as you judge appropriate, always adding to it a bit of alum.

An attractive black is made by staining the wood first in a concoction of wood of India (or Campeachy, which is the same thing). When this first application is dry, you dip the wood in a concoction of gall nut in which you have put some ferrous sulfate, or vitriol of Rome. Sometimes one only makes a single dye of these various ingredients, of which the proportion should be 1 part nut gall, 1 part vitriol and 6 parts of Campeachy, all boiled together, into which you dip the wood until it is penetrated.

A grey tint is made with a concoction of nut gall, into which you dissolve some green vitriol [ferrous sulfate] in smaller quantity than for the black stain. The more ferrous sulfate-cuprous there is, the deeper grey it will be. The normal proportion is one part of ferrous sulfate for two parts of nut gall.

The Way to Tint Composite Colors

The ordinary green stain of cabinetmakers is made with the same ingredients as for the blue, to which is added the barberry in more or less quantity, according to whether the green should be more or less deep.

One can make a very beautiful apple green in staining first the wood in ordinary blue, and then dipping it in a concoction of woad, and that with more or less time according to whether one wants to have a green more or less strong.

Violet is made with a concoction of Campeachy, to which one has mixed some alum from Rome. One can have violet more or less deep by staining first the woods in rose and then in the blue, which will give a clear violet.

If, on the contrary, one wishes to have a brown-red leaning toward violet, one stains the wood first in the concoction of Brasilwood, then in that of the Campeachy.

One can obtain composite dye of all nuances imaginable by tinting the wood in a primary color then in another one more or less dark, so that the stain that results from these two colors reflects more or less of each other. This is very possible to do because one is the master to strengthen or weaken the primary colors as one judges appropriate, whether by reason of what the form of the object re-quires, or even by reason of the different quality of wood, which takes the dye more or less well, or strengthens or weakens the color. This has to be highly considered, and it requires much attention and experience on the part of cabinetmakers.

In general, all the dyes of which I just spoke are applied in cold baths. It is not that many of them cannot be used hot, but it is that because it takes a considerable amount of time for the same dye to penetrate into the interior of wood, it is not possible to use them hot. What’s more, cold dyed wood has much more vibrancy than when used with a hot bath.

There it is, a bit of the details of staining [dyeing] wood, at least those that most cabinetmakers use, or which I myself have employed in the attempts that I have made. These have succeeded rather well, but they have not been followed by a long enough time to be assured of the success of my at-tempts. It would be highly wished that those who are currently making use of these dyes, or who will be using them later, apply themselves to perfect them which, I believe, is not absolutely impossible. Having done this, they would be rather good citizens to not make a mystery of their discoveries, but only succeed by rendering them public.

Cabinetmakers dye not only their woods for veneer to use them in the place of the natural color of the woods. They also use these same dyes to accentuate various parts of their works while they are being worked. As such, these dyes, like the red of Brasilwood, the violet of the Campeachy, the black, etc., are used hot, which is very easy to do because it is sufficient for only the exterior of the woods being dyed. Other than these dyes, woodworkers in furniture sometimes use a type of yellow color for bedsteads, which is composed of yellow ochre and common varnish, or of this same ochre and the very clear English glue, sometimes they even put it in only water, which is of little use.

Before finishing the dyeing of wood, I believe I ought to give a least-costly method of dyeing white wood red, which is done in the following manner:

you take some horse dung, which you put in a bucket of which the bottom is pierced with many holes, and you place it above another bucket, into which falls the water from the dung, as it gradually rots. When it does not rot fast enough, you water it from time to time with some horse urine, which helps a lot and at the same time gives a red water, which not only stains the surface of the wood, but penetrates the interior 3 to 4 lines deep. In staining the wood with this dye, one must take care that all the pieces be of the same species, and about equal in density if one wishes that they be of equal color throughout. This observation is general for all water-based stains, which have no palpable thickness nor even appearance [they leave no residue or any evident change in appearance], which requires the cabinetmaker to make a choice of wood of equal color and a density as I mentioned before. This demands a lot of experience and attention on the part of the cabinetmakers. And with the exception of the way to compose and use dyes, it is hardly possible to give theoretical rules on this part, for which success is not often due to anything but experience, which is not acquired except with a lot of time, attention and work.