Category: Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley

Tens of thousands of woodworkers have a poster of the famed H.O. Studley tool chest on their shop walls. Studley, however, didn’t need the poster – he had the real thing. So what poster did he tack to his shop wall?

A circa 1917 advertisement for U.S. Government bonds that was painted by Eugenie DeLand and features the Statue of Liberty.

Reader Lynn Bradford pointed out that you can buy this poster through a variety of sources, including here at allposters.com. So if you want to go full meta on the Studley experience, get the poster, some suspenders and a skinny tie.

— Christopher Schwarz

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been hunkered in the bunker out here in the Virginia Highlands, only partly because a) it was Thanksgiving week and b) we got a foot-and-a-half of snow earlier in the week. No, the culprit behind the current spate of sedentary-ness has been the tasks of c) reviewing and revising the completed text, and d) selecting, editing and captioning the approximately 450 images that will impart great richness to “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.”

The chapter inventorying the tool cabinet and its contents is slated for – at this point – more than 275 photographs! Because I will be sending the FINAL version to Chris a week from Monday I will be “nose to the grindstone” until that occurrence.

Some weeks ago, as I had the written manuscript in its final stages, I confessed to Chris that my enthusiasm for the project was flagging a bit and I was frankly pretty tired. His reply took me by surprise. Paraphrased, he exhorted me with the dictum that no book project is really finished until some time after the point where its contributors want to put it on the table, pile manure on it, whip out the butane lighter and set it on fire.

Given the current usage of the wood stove here in the cabin, I don’t need no stinking lighter.

— Don Williams, www.donsbarn.com & www.studleytoolchest.com

Don Williams and I are deep into the guts of his book on H.O. Studley’s tool cabinet and workbench – doing everything we can to get the book out in March 2015 – just in time for the exhibit of the chest at Handworks.

We have found a hole in the visual record of the cabinet that we would like to fill. The cabinet was on display at the Smithsonian as part of the exhibit “Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution 1790-1860” in a vignette with several other tool chests for various trades. Though the exhibit lasted almost 20 years (late 1986 to mid-2006), the Studley tool cabinet was included for perhaps only a third of that time, probably 1994-1999.

We know that thousands of woodworkers saw the cabinet during this exhibit. But we do not have a photo of the cabinet in the display. Do you?

If so, please send an e-mail to Don Williams. If your photo fits the bill it could end up in our forthcoming book on the cabinet and workbench.

Thanks in advance for any help in this matter.

— Christopher Schwarz

About 48 hours to go.

As I write this, that is my estimate of when I get to pass off the 40,000 words and 500 pictures of the manuscript for “VIRTUOSO: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley” into the custody of Chris Schwarz and Narayan Nayar, who will respectively edit and illustrate it with sumptuous photographs.

It could not come soon enough, as for the past five months (with the major exception of chopping firewood) I have been pretty much All-Studley-All-The-Time, including the past two months of 16-hour days in Studley-ville. Before that it was five years of Some-Studley-Much-Of-The-Time.

And for a scrawny dead guy, old Henry was getting pretty heavy on my neck.

Despite some unavoidable lacunae (look it up, people, it is a fine and honorable word) in the manuscript because of information I simply have not been able to find yet, as I review the book-in-waiting for the last time it is not an outcome with which I am displeased.

Over to you, Chris and Narayan.

— Don Williams
www.donsbarn.com
www.studleytoolchestexhibit.com

Editor’s note: “VIRTUOSO: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley” will be available in March 2015.

Most of the verbiage I’ve read about the H.O. Studley tool chest has been misleading, candy-coated or just silly. I can say this because I’ve spent the last five years embedded with Don Williams, the author of our forthcoming book “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of H.O. Studley.”

Thanks to the scholarship of Don and his research assistants, we now have a clear(er) picture of Studley and the history of his chest and workbench.

For the first look at some of the real Studley story, I recommend you check out Matt Vanderlist’s blog at “Matt’s Basement Workbench” this coming Friday. Matt was kind enough to do a Skype interview with Don and Narayan Nayar, the photographer on the project.

They chatted with Matt last week while sitting in front of the chest and discussed some of the questions many woodworkers ask: Who was Studley? Why did he build the chest? And what will become of it?

Matt will publish the full 30-minute interview on his blog for free this Friday. Those who support Matt as a Patreon will also get a (very) cool segment we did on the workbench with Narayan manning the camera.

Go there on Friday!

— Christopher Schwarz