Today marks a major milestone in the production of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” Designer Wesley Tanner has sent us the first 126 pages of the book for us to mark up.
It is gorgeous work on Wesley’s part.
For those of you waiting on your copy, you’ve probably figured out that we’re running behind. We’d hoped to have the book out this month, but we’re still proofing the pages. Everyone working on this project wants this book finished, but everyone also wants it (apologies in advance) as perfect as possible.
So I’ll be editing this book in Australia this month. Don Williams and Michele Pagan will be checking the text (again) from their homes. I’ll post updates on the process when we reach another significant waypoint.
And no, I’m afraid we don’t have a price settled on either version of the book – we have to have a final page count to get a good quote from the printer.
Because I don’t have any more good information, I’ll merely distract you with this photo of a shiny object we do have in-house this week.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Tomorrow I’ll post an update on “By Hand & By Eye” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. It’s near the finish line.
I don’t need a workbench. I really don’t need to build another French workbench. And I don’t need to spend a week in the Deep South in the middle of summer hoisting thousands of pounds of ancient oak with a bunch of (for the most part) middle-aged, hairy-backed sweaty dudes.
And yet that is exactly what I’ll be doing starting on July 15.
The lovable nutjobs at Benchcrafted have, with some help, put together a bench-building event that made me clear my summer calendar, forsake a family vacation and pony up some serious cash to be involved.
The benches will be massive, built like the simple French versions shown in “L’Art du Menuisier” by A.J. Roubo. The wood is ancient, thick and French. The hardware? Authentic – with metal bits being made by blacksmith Peter Ross. And the machinery we’ll be using to make the benches is big enough to handle it.
I’ll be there to lend a hand with students, talk about the history of workbench design, build a bench for myself and try not to inhale too deeply the inevitable body odor.
All it takes is money. So head on over to the high-IQ sperm bank. Get a paper route. Sell off that bottle of fingernail clippings you’ve been hoarding. This is the bench-building event of the decade – if not a lifetime.
I could prattle on about all the details, but you should instead head over to the Benchcrafted blog page here, see all the photos, read all the text and try like hell to make it.
Craftsman W. Patrick Edwards recently made an interesting video on marquetry in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago. Patrick discusses the video, which you can view at his site, and also explores the history of the “chevalet” – a saw guide that assists the craftsman.
The most modern of these different works are at least of the last century, and we don’t make them now because they say: This is not in style. As if that which is really beautiful [is] not forever, and that works of sculpture and or gold, often very mediocre (as is made too often nowadays), were preferable to chefs-d’oeuvre of the last century, for which we have no regard for any more, and for which we have substituted elegant super-abundance, which has no other merit than being of the passing style, which is soon erased by another, which doesn’t even exist longer than the caprice of those who have invented it.
Editor’s note: The below entry is part of a series of articles we have commissioned Brian Anderson to write about André Roubo in preparationd for the publication of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” Brian, the translator for “Grandpa’s Workshop,” also wrote this entry on Roubo’s famous dome.
It must have been a popular topic for the local gossips – the apprentice joiner André Roubo begging, here and there, a cup of lard or tallow from the taverns and housewives in the Paris neighborhood.
A boy from a poor family begging a cup of lard for his mother to cook, would have been one thing. But the young André did not want it to cook with, but to fuel a simple oil lamp for light to study by. At the time, in the 1750s, it would have been rare enough for an ordinary worker to even know how to read. Spending money on learned books on geometry, mathematics, perspective and design and then plowing through them would have been a scandal in itself.
Roubo had been born in 1739 into a working class family. His father was a joiner, but according to the noted French architect, Louis-Auguste Boileau, who wrote a short biography of Roubo in 1834, the father was a worker of the crudest sort. The young man, apprenticed to his father at 12 or so, soon realized both that he loved the theory and practice of joinery, and that if he did not want to spend his life doing the lowest sorts of work for pennies a day, he would have to figure a way up and out himself.
Boileau wrote that he threw himself into his studies, going hungry sometimes to purchase his first books out of the pittance his father allowed him for his work. The young joiner attracted the notice of others with his enthusiasm, talent and thirst for learning as he worked for his father, eventually becoming a joiner in his own right.
But his big break came when a noted architect, Jean-Francois Blondel, took Roubo under his tutelage and gave him free tuition to his well-regarded school of architecture in Paris.
AMAND Jacques-François (1730-1769) : L’atelier du Sieur Jadot
For five years, Roubo worked in his trade during the day; and then evenings, weekends, every free moment available, he spent pouring over the lessons Blondel set out for him. Mathematics, mechanics, perspective, design, different types of drawing. Plus, the building blocks of architecture, which also gave him enormous insight into his own trade.
Roubo proved as apt at these studies as he had at the practice of joinery, but Boileau notes that unlike some presented with a similar opportunity, Roubo apparently loved his craft. He loved to work wood, and was not tempted to move “up” into architecture.
Blondel was also a practicing architect, and a member of the French Academy of the Fine Arts, and his young protégé also proved adept at extending his circle of acquaintances from the people he met through the school and among the architect’s circles of friends and colleagues.
These connections would later prove invaluable, as Roubo’s thoughts turned from his studies to writing his own books.
— Brian Anderson
Not much to do with Roubo, of course, but too cool not to include.
