I finished up an Andre Roubo try square last night – this one in row-grain mahogany,
The funny thing about this square is that it is the first one I’ve made in a species that Roubo himself might actually have used. All the other French squares I’ve made have been using North American species: American beech, maple, walnut and cherry.
What’s funny about that? Of all the squares I’ve made, I like this one the least. The square’s blade is perfectly quartersawn and has that row grain that is a result of the interlocked grain. I think it’s visually distracting, even though it’s proper, and I’ve seen many wooden tools that look this way.
The bridle joint also has a small gash at the baseline when my chisel slipped. But the square is square and is nice and lightweight. So maybe I’ll come to like it after it gets grungy.
On the docket today is a full load of Roubo. I’m editing the last chapter of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” I’m also building a three-legged campaign stool from his original 18th-century text.
This should be a fun build, and an opportunity to use up some of the small leather scraps from our last run of Roorkhee chairs. The only trick to the stool is the hardware. I found a way to make it without welding, which was the traditional method.
I honestly doubt the following blog entry will convince a single person to purchase the deluxe “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” In fact, it might make a few of you rescind your orders.
But so be it.
Editing this book has been a personal struggle the likes of which I haven’t had since 1979. That was the year I heard “Outlandos d’Amour,” the first record from The Police. That piece of vinyl wrenched me from the mainstream of American pop music and set me on a journey of discovery that continues to this day – I purchase at least one album a week. “Outlandos” inspired me to learn to play bass guitar and the electric six-string. It pushed me to start a rock band I in was in through college and beyond.
But it also was a painful social transition that kicked me to the sidelines of Fort Smith, Ark.
As I have been reading A.J. Roubo – both in English and French – and struggling at times, I have had one verse from The Police running through my head almost the entire time.
And on the days that followed I listened to his words I strained to understand him I chased his thoughts like birds
You will see light in the darkness You will make some sense of this
That is the only way I can explain what it’s like to read this stuff. Unlike most woodworking books, Roubo can be an incredible mental challenge for the 21st-century woodworker. It is not for babies. If you think this book is going to spoon-feed you the secrets to French marquetry and joinery, I’m afraid it will disappoint.
I struggled for two days with Roubo’s explanation of drawing in perspective. Figuring out the tail vise on his “German Workbench” was like wrestling a brown bear. I’m still straining in places to understand some of his explanations for working curved pieces of marquetry.
I don’t blame Roubo. The fault lies with our modern minds and the way we are accustomed to learning. Because when clarity comes, it is like lightning. Things relating to veneer, layout and marquetry that seemed difficult or impossible are actually quite straightforward. I might not (yet) have the hand skills to do them, but I know the shortest and easiest route to get there.
And after enough flashes of insight and slapping my forehead until it is red, I have found inspiration in Roubo’s words and what is beneath his words.
Roubo’s footnotes reveal the man as one of us – someone any woodworker would love to drink a glass of wine with (I’d probably order a saison). Like us, Roubo was struggling to make sense of a craft that was dying in front of his eyes. He laments the skills and techniques that are lost. He bemoans the cheap goods that are supplanting works made with a skilled hand. He questions his own capability as a woodworker and his limits.
These volumes have been inspiring in ways I can’t quite put into words – except to compare it to hearing “Can’t Stand Losing You” on the radio and then picking up my uncle’s guitar, determined to learn to play and sing that song for myself.
Tomorrow I have to leave for Atlanta for a short trip, but I’ll be back on Monday and back in the shop to whittle down my long list of projects and put the finishing touches on the last chapter of our Roubo translation. I cannot wait. Soon – very soon – you will also be able to chase Roubo’s thoughts like birds.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Indeed, today is the last day to order our deluxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” until the book is released. You can place a $100 deposit on the book here in our store. Don’t fret if you cannot afford the deluxe edition. There will be plenty of our trade editions available for everyone. Read the Roubo FAQ here.
As promised, here is a quick update on the books we are working on at Lost Art Press.
“By Hand & By Eye” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin
Layout artist Linda Watts has just finished her part of the book – with a couple loose ends. Tonight, Megan Fitzpatrick and I are going to review her layouts and make sure everything looks good before we do the final copy editing and send it to the authors for their approval. I hope to have this book to the printer in about three weeks.
“To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” by Don Williams, Michele Pietryka-Pagán and Philippe LaFargue
This project has been keeping us up late at night. I have a bit of editing to do on the last chapter. Don is taking some additional photography. And book designer Wesley Tanner is now laying out pages. We are running behind schedule, but we are all doing everything we can to get this book to the printer in February.
“Windsor Chairs: A Foundation” by Peter Galbert
Peter has completed his first draft of the chapters. He is revising the first draft and drawing the illustrations for the book. I’ve read through most of the chapters. As a chairmaker, I am very excited about this book. Peter is a gifted craftsman and has many methods that are new to me. We hope to have this book ready for Christmas.
“Saws: Construction, Tuning & Use” (Tentative Title) by Andrew Lunn
Andrew has been plugging away on this book. His first draft is mostly complete and it is pretty mind-blowing. I don’t know when this one will be done, but work continues.
“Build a 17th-century Chest” (Tentative Title) by Peter Follansbee
Peter is building chests – they look great – for this book. No word yet on when he’ll be done.
“Virtuoso: The Tool Chest of H.O. Studley” by Don Williams
Don and the photography team will make a return visit to the chest in March. Don has been researching Studley’s masonic history. No release date yet.
“Furniture of Necessity” by Christopher Schwarz
I’ve written three chapters now. But I have put all my personal writing projects on hold until I get Roubo and “By Hand & By Eye” to the printer.
“Campaign Furniture” by Christopher Schwarz
Ditto. I’m designing the second campaign chest for the book, which I’ll begin building next month. But progress is slow because… see above.
“Super-secret LAP book” by Cannot Say
I’ve hinted at this book for some time. This is a project we have been working on since the day we started this company. Things are finally coming together on this title, thanks to a computer script written by shop assistant Ty Black. This allowed us to process thousands of images automatically, shortening our timeline by at least two years. We are shooting to announce this book sometime this summer and publish it in late 2013 or early 2014. Don’t bother asking more about this book because we’ve all sworn a blood oath.
There are other projects still in the pipeline, but these are the ones we are actively working on.
During the last year I’ve heard a lot of smack talk about the traditional French-style workbench, which many people simply call a “Roubo” because it is featured in “L’Art du Menuisier.”
In fact, my first drubbing came in 2005 when I built my first French bench. A prominent woodworking writer delivered this salvo: “That bench in Roubo was intended for joiners, people who did house carpentry. Not for cabinetwork. You have chosen the wrong bench to build.”
This is bullcrap.
Not just because I call it bullcrap, but because the archaeological record and the written record say it’s crap.
Roubo’s five-volume work isn’t just about house carpentry and house joinery. It’s also about carriage making, fine furniture, marquetry, parquetry, veneering, finishing and garden furniture. While Roubo certainly knew about other benches (he illustrates a “German” one in one volume), he chose to illustrate the classic French bench in almost every instance throughout all his books.
So yup (sarcasm fully engaged), this bench is good only for heavy work like this.
Or coarse work like this.
You’d only make sash or wainscot on it, like this.
No fine cabinetry would be built on it, especially nothing dovetailed.
The beauty of the French form of bench is it’s a blank sheet of paper. You can easily adapt it for any work – heavy, light or in-between. It is easy to build – you need to know only one joint, really. Beginners don’t need to learn to dovetail a skirt around the top or install complex vises. Heck, I worked for a year on the French bench without anything you would call a vise – just a crochet and holdfasts.
If you process stock by hand, it’s heavy enough for fore-planing. If you’re a router wizard, it’s an expansive deck of places to clamp things to – completely unobstructed.
If you are somewhere in-between these extremes, you will be fully satisfied.
The French bench has downsides. It requires more wood than some other designs. The pieces can be too heavy for some woodworker who work alone. You might have to glue up a lot of boards to make the top or search for a thick slab (which really are not hard to find).
But the bench works like crazy, I prefer it over every form I’ve worked on or built.
I understand that some woodworkers see benches like a hemline. This one is in fashion. Now that one. Ooh, no one builds benches like Ian Kirby’s anymore. And that’s fine. You can run down the design because it’s so ubiquitous. Or because I like it.
But don’t look like a fool and say the bench is for crude work only. The ghost of A.J. Roubo is likely to pay you a visit one dark night.
“In the past, the carpenter’s guild enjoyed great prestige. To be a house carpenter was to know how to lay out and join, with precision, the often huge systems of trusses needed to support the enormous weight of a roof in stone or tile. At the time it was very learned work, and lent to those who practiced the art an uncontested predominance.”
— René Fontaine, architect
On the 31st of January, 1783, André-Jacob Roubo stood on a platform 38 meters (125 ft.) above the streets of Paris, which spread out around him in all directions. He was just below the pinnacle of the wooden dome he had designed to cover the round interior courtyard of the Grain Market near the center of the city. The structure spanned 39.5 meters without any internal support, and it had been constructed of an uncountable number of spruce planks, laid out and precisely joined by a small army of carpenters.
Far below, the carpenters were removing the last of the scaffolding that had supported the structure during construction, and, from a safe distance, a large crowd had gathered around the small band of officials from the market and the city.
There had been no volunteers to join Roubo at the top. Would it all come crashing down?
Paris’s grain and flour market, a stone’s throw from the Louvre and the river Seine, had been finished in 1767. The land set aside for the project formed a rough pentagon, and it was decided to build a round building with a courtyard to maximize the available light from the arches on the exterior and interior walls of the building. Over the years, the central court had been haphazardly filled with various rudimentary structures to shelter the merchants as the commerce grew.
France loves its bread as much as it loves its wine.
When the merchants in the market grumbled about the lack of space and the shambles in the courtyard, Paris listened and decided to put a roof on it. It would have been possible to build pillars to support the weight of the structure, but in the spirit of the enlightenment and of Paris, they decided to stretch the limits of the possible, and they engaged a couple of architects to build a dome.
It was a complicated project. There existed in the world at the time domes of a similar size, the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul was 31 meters, the Pantheon in Rome, 43, and the Duomo in Florence spanned 44 meters. But as the noted French architect Louis-Auguste Boileau wrote in a short biography of Roubo in 1834, the market had been built over a number of much older foundations of uncertain strength; and the structure, with its relatively thin walls and all the arches, had not been designed to, and could not possibly be expected to support the weight of a dome in stone and/or brick. Plus, it was a market after all, and the money and time needed for such a structure would have been a deal-ender.
The dome would have to be built in wood. But who could design and build a wooden dome with a span of 39 meters? One of the architect’s assistants had the answer: There was only one man in France who might be able to get the job done.
In early 1782, Roubo received a visit from the young architects, Legrand and Molinos, who had been engaged for the project. He listened to what they wanted and said he needed a night to think about it. The next day, he told them he would do it, but only on condition that he would be free to build the dome as he saw fit.
The details of the conversation were not recorded. But as Boileau wrote, Roubo, who had just finished his masterwork, the series of books “L’art De La Menuiserie,” had an ace in the hole, another book two centuries old. One can imagine him listening to the architects outlining the project and its constraints, and then after asking a night to think about it, pulling a dusty big book off the shelf in his study or in a library. “Inventions to Build Well at Low Cost” (“Inventions Pour Bien Batir à Petites Frais”) by the architect Philibert Delorme, who had worked much of his career for the French king, Henri II, but had been mostly forgotten by Roubo’s time.
The book included way of building various kinds of arches, using ordinary planks intricately joined with pegs, notches and wedges. The arches are joined together using an integral network of wedged crossbars to form a vault or a dome. The result is a remarkably light and modern construction that concentrated the stresses in tension and compression to take advantage of the strengths of wood and prefigured similar designs in iron and steel. It was in sharp contrast to traditional wooden roof structures based on the triangle, where the maximum span was dictated mostly by the wood available in suitable length and dimensions for the base.
The construction took only five months. But, as you can imagine, when building a new type of structure at that scale requiring countless thousands of pieces of wood that are shaped by hand to very high tolerances by a small army of carpenters, all did not go to plan. Boileau in his biography wrote: “(H)e encountered difficulties of every type, and personally checked and adjusted if need be, the numberless pieces of wood… ”
So on that January day, the last of the scaffolding was taken away. The crowd held its breath. And nothing happened. Roubo’s design had worked. The waiting crowd swarmed into the Grain Market and carried Roubo away on their shoulders in triumph.
The dome was roofed in lead and copper with large vertical strips of glass to illuminate the interior. The structure performed as designed for almost 20 years until it was destroyed in 1802 by wood’s ancient enemy: fire. The dome was later rebuilt in iron, and the work took not five months, but five years to complete, between 1806 and 1811. The building now houses France’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
Boileau wrote that the innovative structure made Roubo famous throughout Europe and brought in a lot of business both in Paris and from around the continent. It is also said that the dome was much admired by a later visitor to Paris, the then-American ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, who famously had a thing for domes.
— Brian Anderson
Editor’s note: You can order our special edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” until the end of January 2013 and guarantee you will receive a copy. Details in our store.
What’s funny about that? Of all the squares I’ve made, I like this one the least. The square’s blade is perfectly quartersawn and has that row grain that is a result of the interlocked grain. I think it’s visually distracting, even though it’s proper, and I’ve seen many wooden tools that look this way.
I struggled for two days with Roubo’s explanation of drawing in perspective. Figuring out the tail vise on his “German Workbench” was like wrestling a brown bear. I’m still straining in places to understand some of his explanations for working curved pieces of marquetry.
