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Late next week some time, the back-and-forth flow of edited manuscripts for “To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Furniture Making,” or “R2” for short in our internal correspondence, will begin between me and Michele Pagan, eventually making their way to my external readers for contextual critiques, and finally to Philippe Lafargue for the ultimate smoothing of the 18th-century French-into-English.

The details of the working process are a little too “inside baseball” to recount here, but I trust the headaches we had with traffic-control on the first volume will be reduced for the second through a much more streamlined process (my directory holds almost a thousand documents for R1). It better be. “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Furniture Making” is almost exactly twice as large as “Roubo On Marquetry.” I can almost see Chris and John reflexively grabbing to protect the corporate wallet. The latter volume took us six-and-a-half years, we are hoping for the former to be complete and on Chris’ desk by this coming spring.

We’re going in.  Wish us good fortune!

— Don Williams

P.S. – Here’s a teaser. For the recent French Oak Roubo Project, Philippe and I worked intensely on the contents of Plate 11 so that I could print and present a polished manuscript on 85# parchment paper – the “owner’s manual” as Jameel Abraham called it – to each participant. I hope it is not unseemly that I believe the result was totally awesome. I hope Chris will bring his copy to WIA for you to see for yourself. My copy is somewhere in  the multitude of boxes in The Barn.

In our excerpt of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry,” A.-J. Roubo offers a recipe for staining wood red using a concoction made using horse dung and urine.

Here’s the recipe:

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.

Woodworker Jonas Jensen of Mors, Denmark, is making this stain and documenting the process on his blog, Mulesaw. Follow along – but be warned, if you don’t like pictures of dung you are not going to like the instructions.

And just a reminder, the standard edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” is almost finished at the printer. If you want the book with free domestic shipping, be sure to place your order before Thursday, Oct. 10.

The standard edition is available in the store here. We have some deluxe versions still available, though the supplies are dwindling. Click here for details on the deluxe edition.

— Christopher Schwarz