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.
The upcoming publication of two books of the translated works of A.J. Roubo (1739-1791) has been the most time-consuming, complex and expensive publishing project I have ever been involved in. It has confused some of our customers – what will be in each book? What won’t? Should I buy the deluxe version? Are these books even worth reading?
I hope that this blog entry will answer those questions.
First, a bit about the original books. A.J. Roubo was an 18th-century “menuisier” – a highly trained third-generation craftsman who served a formal apprenticeship. Between 1769 and 1774 he published five volumes that cover the following woodworking topics:
1. Tools and Architectural Woodwork
2. Carriage Making
3. Furniture Making
4. Marquetry and Finishing
5. Garden Woodwork
These five volumes were assembled into three books that measure 12” x 18-1/8” each. The first book contains volumes one and two. The second book contains volume three. The third book has volumes four and five.
Through determination and dumb luck, I own a full set of these original 18th-century books in mint condition. That’s not a boast – we had to possess the originals to ensure the reproduction quality was perfect for our books. I had all the plates in the books scanned by a company that does museum-quality work for our books.
The 18th-century editions are not the only ones out there. In 1977, Leonce Laget published a reproduction of the original five volumes (again bound into three books). These books are slightly smaller than the originals – 11-1/2” x 17. The print quality is good, but I think we can do better.
This 1977 edition was limited to 500 copies. Yes, we own a complete set here at Lost Art Press, which we use for day-to-day reference. There also is a 1982 version of the books published by Laget that I have not seen.
There also is a third version of the books published by La Bibliothèque de l’image in 2002. These are softcover and are in an even smaller format. I once had a set of these but gave them to a French-speaking friend to enjoy.
About the Translation Process
Enter Don Williams and his team of translators, who have been taking the 18th-century French and putting it into 21st-century English.
Several people have said the following to me during the last four years: “What is taking so dang long? Just type the text into Google Translate and be done with it.”
Try that for yourself. I promise that within a couple sentences you will be lost.
The French of the 18th century is not the French from my high school. Add the fact that you are dealing with an idiomatic trade language, and you will overwhelm any online translation program within a few words.
Roubo’s work is something that has to be translated word-by-word, trench-warfare style. It has to be matched up with the plates, with the idioms of the time, with the trade language and – here’s the hard part – it has to make sense in the end.
Before I got involved with this project I translated several parts of Roubo’s writings on my own with the help of my French skills, my wife’s formidable in-country French skills and all the reference material you could want.
It took us about two hours to translate a single paragraph.
Translating this stuff has been a long process. Every word, every comma and every footnote has to be analyzed and carefully massaged into English. Otherwise it’s just gibberish that isn’t worth reading.
The translation started with Michele Pietryka-Pagán, who made a fairly literal translation of the text, and passed it to Don Williams. Don – using the plates plus his knowledge of woodworking, marquetry and finishing – adjusted the wording to ensure it was technically correct. Then it went to Philippe LaFargue, a native French speaker and craftsman who has read the original text. He checked the translation against the original work to ensure the translation was (again) technically correct and captured the essence – and flow – of Roubo’s original words.
Meanwhile, Don has been preparing a set of 10 additional essays that will amplify certain parts of the text. There is an essay on sawing veneer where Don builds a sawing frame – called a “standing saw” – plus the bench for it and makes veneer à la Roubo. There are several marquetry essays where Don executes exercises shown in Roubo, using the tools and jigs shown in the plates.
These 10 short essays will appear in our book, along with photographs of the processes that Don explains. And that brings us to what we will be publishing in 2013 and 2014.
About the Two Lost Art Press Books
Lost Art Press is publishing two books. The first is “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” It will be released in the first quarter of 2013. The second book is “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Furniture.” It should be out in 2014.
You can read the table of contents for each book in this blog entry. As you can see from the contents, each book covers a broad spectrum of woodworking processes. The marquetry book, for example, includes Roubo’s writing on wood as a raw material, how to dye or color it, general finishing operations, many tool descriptions and the section on Roubo’s German workbench, which has not been published in English as far as I know.
Personally, I would purchase both books, even though I do not have a burning interest in marquetry. I have been riveted to this first volume for months and have soaked in so much new information it’s like being a beginning woodworker again. Don, who has been in the trade for 40 years, had the same experience. Don has called the author “Roubo the transformer.” I couldn’t agree more.
On top of all that, W. Patrick Edwards of the American School of French Marquetry has agreed to write the introduction to “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.”
Two Versions of the Two Books Now here is where things get a little complicated. We are going to publish two versions of each of the above two books. For each book – marquetry and furniture – there will be a fancy limited-edition version and a standard hardbound version.
All of these books will be designed by Wesley Tanner, a woodworker and life-long book designer. You can see some his work at Passim Editions.
The fancy limited-edition version of the book will have the following qualities:
1. It will be printed in 12” x 17” format, very similar to the 18th-century size.
2. It will be in full color. That means the plates will be the same color as they are in the original – the ink isn’t exactly black. And all of the photos for Don’s essays will be in color.
3. The plates will be published in their full and original size.
4. The paper and binding will be of the highest quality.
5. Customers who order before the end of January 2013 will have their name listed in the book as a “subscriber.”
6. The book will be printed and bound entirely in the United States, like all Lost Art Press books.
7. There will be a limited number of these books – probably 500. Once these copies are sold, there will be no more.
8. The cost for this book will be about $400 (I hope it will be a little less). We are now taking $100 deposits for this book here. Everyone who makes a deposit before Jan. 31, 2013, will receive one of these books.
9. We are taking international orders for this special edition. Contact John Hoffman at john@lostartpress.com for details on placing a deposit via PayPal.
10. When we publish the Roubo book on furniture, we will make the same pre-publication offer as we did for marquetry. So everyone who wants a special version of that book will be guaranteed one if they make a deposit.
11. We hope to have this book available in March 2013. If you make a deposit on the book we will contact you personally to complete the transaction when the book is ready to ship.
The standard hardbound version of this book will have the following qualities:
1. It will be printed in a smaller format, something closer to 8-1/2” x 11”.
2. It will be in black and white.
3. The plates will be published in reduced size to fit the smaller format.
4. The paper and binding will be similar to other Lost Art Press books – acid-free paper and Smythe-sewn binding.
5. We will have a pre-publication offer for this book when we get closer to the release date.
6. The book will be printed and bound entirely in the United States, like all Lost Art Press books.
7. This books will stay in print as long as we are in business.
8. The cost for this book will be about $60.
9. This book will be sold internationally through our retailers overseas. See our international retailers here.
10. We hope to have this book available in March 2013.
Frequently asked questions about the Roubo translation books:
Will there be Kindle and ePub versions of these books?
Yes, but I don’t know when they will be released. We want to ensure that the plates are extremely high in resolution so you can zoom as close as possible. As a result, we will have to electronically rebuild the books for Kindle and ePub. But I am confident this will happen.
Will you publish a CD or book of just the plates?
This is a common question, and the answer is: I don’t know. I’ve been staring at the plates alone for years. And while there is good information presented in them, things really come alive when you add the text. So my gut is to focus our efforts on ePub and Kindle versions of the book. That will make the plates portable, explorable and still understandable. I’m not saying we won’t offer the plates by themselves at some point, but it is not a high priority.
Will you publish translated books on architecture, carriage-making or garden woodwork?
If we do this it won’t be in the near future. These two books have consumed so much energy from so many people during the last four years that some of us need a break to pursue other projects that we have set aside in the name of Roubo. We are open to the idea of doing the other volumes, but we have a long list of things that have to be done prior.
Can my woodworking club/hospital/orphanage receive a free copy?
Sad to say, no. We don’t take free tools, books or wood. We don’t carpet-bomb the media with free Lost Art Press books in the hope of a kind word. And we don’t discount our products or give them out for free.
Will you sell boxed sets of both books?
I don’t know. Maybe.
Can I buy the book and electronic edition at a discount?
We don’t bundle our products much. In general, our philosophy is to offer our products at the best price possible. We don’t jack up the price of our products so we can give you a discount on a bundle of several products. We prefer to have a price, stick to it and charge everyone the same price. We don’t want to spend our time (or yours) playing games with the numbers. We’d rather be woodworking or making books.
No one is going to get a big paycheck for this book. Don and his team should have spent their time in law school instead of translating Roubo (if they wanted to get rich, that is). All woodworking books and magazines are works of love. They are the most difficult thing to publish (except for peer-reviewed medical literature). You do this because you love it. I can look anyone in the eye and ask $400 for this book.
And if you don’t like the price, wait a few years. I’m sure it will go down and you can score it on AbeBooks for $20. </sarcasm>
This is going to sound like marketing garbage. It really isn’t.
Several readers have requested that we extend the deadline for taking pre-publication orders of the forthcoming deluxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.”
These readers have requested the extension because they have lots of bills due from the holiday season – and an extra 30 days would help them shore up their finances before placing the $100 deposit on the book.
Because we haven’t placed our order with the printer yet, we can extend the deadline. And so we will.
That means you now have until Jan. 31, 2013, to place a $100 deposit on the luxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” and have your name listed in the book as a “Subscriber.”
For more details on this version of the book, read our description in the store here.
This week I’ll post an update on the Roubo project and include an FAQ on all the Roubo-related books in the pipeline.
…because it has six sides, instead of our puny three. No, no, I kid.
Let’s back up for a second for those who don’t know much about the “cabinetmaker’s triangle” shown above in plate 18 from A.J. Roubo’s “L’Art du Menuisier.” The triangle is scrawled on almost all assemblies so that we can immediately orient our pieces when we glue them together.
The triangle trumps all the crazy “AA, BB” and numbering systems I’ve seen and used. The triangle is simpler and almost foolproof.
So why is the French triangle better that a plain equilateral triangle? It is even more foolproof than a plain triangle. With a plain triangle that is marked on the edges of assemblies – think dovetailed drawer – there are times when a part of a triangle can look like the mark for a “true edge” – sometimes called the “carat.”
You cannot make that mistake if you use a French triangle. The loops at the base prevent it from looking like a carat. And the fourth line to the apex prevents it from looking like a carat at the tip.
Plus, chicks dig it.
I’ve been using the French triangle for about a month in my shop. When Megan Fitzpatrick, executive editor from Popular Woodworking Magazine, stopped by to drop off some lumber she saw the French triangle on a panel and said: “Oh, pretty!”
