We have a box of slightly damaged copies of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” from the first two printings that we are offering at the reduced price of $18 plus shipping.
The damage to these copies is cosmetic: A corner was bruised during manufacturing or shipping, there is a small tear to the cotton cover, or a drip of glue from the bindery.
All the copies are 100 percent readable.
All the copies are also marked as damaged with a green marker across the bottom. All sales are final on these copies. We have only 14 damaged copies. Once they are gone, they are gone.
What is all this about joint stools, you ask? English examples abound, but surviving New England ones are rare today. But in the period, they were so commonplace that it is hard to imagine a period house without them. Probate inventories filed at the time of a person’s death are a standard resource for material culture studies, and in these records we find numerous references to joint stools. Rarely itemized by themselves, they are usually lumped with a table or other seating furniture. In 1646, Michael Carthrick of Ipswich, Mass., had:
“one great cubberd £1; an old little table & 3 chaires 4s/6d; one bedsted in the
parlour £1/4s; one chaire & 3 joyned stooles 10s; 2 chestes & 3 boxes £1” [The values are pounds/shillings/pence. 12 pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to one pound (£). At that time in New England, a master tradesman might earn 2 to 2-1/2 shillings per day.]
A typical New England reference is this 1647 listing: “One longe table & frame, 4 joynt stooles & a bench £1-13.” In this case, the “table” is what we would call the tabletop, and the frame is just that, the understructure of the table. We find the same sort of thing back in old England, the stools once again lumped with the table and usually also a “form” – a joint stool stretched out to bench-length. In Essex, England, in 1638 John Osbourne’s inventory recorded “in the hall: One great joyned table, eight stooles and one forme, £1-10s.”
Poke around the English countryside enough and you can run into a table, joint stools and form that are all still in place, 350 to 400 years in one spot! The table is really just a joint stool made on a very large scale, same construction, same format. Easier, really. All 90° shoulders.
Randle Holme, the author of The “Academy of Armory & Blazon” had this to say about joint stools: “It is so called because all made and finished by the Joyner, haueing a wood couer: In most places in Cheshire it is termed a Buffit stool.”
Another interesting reference to them is a court case in London surrounding an infringement of trade issue, between the Turners of the City and the Joiners.
1633 We have called before us as well the Master & Warden of the Comp[an]y of Turners as also the M & W of the Compy of Joyners. It appeareth that the Compy of Turners be grieved that the Compy of Joyners assume unto themselves the art of turning to the wrong of the Turners. It appeareth to us that the arts of turning & joyning are two several & distinct trades and we conceive it very inconvenient that either of these trades should encroach upon the other and we find that the Turners have constantly for the most part turned bed posts & feet of joyned stools for the Joyners and of late some Joyners who never used to turn their own bedposts and stool feet have set on work in their houses some poor decayed Turners & of them have learned the feate & art of turning which they could not do before. And it appeareth unto us by custom that the turning of Bedposts Feet of tables joyned stools do properly belong to the trade of a Turner and not to the art of a Joyner and whatsoever is done with the foot as have treddle or wheele for turning of any wood we are of the opinion and do find that it properly belongs to the Turner’s and we find that the Turners ought not to use the gage or gages, grouffe plaine or plough plaine and mortising chisells or any of them for that the same do belong to the Joyners trade. [From Henry Laverock Phillips, Annals of the Worshipful Company of Joiners of the City of London, (London: privately printed, 1915) pp. 27, 28.]
Here in New England, there was no such restriction on a man’s trade. If you had the training and skills, you could work at both the bench and the lathe. The same was true in the countryside in England. In “Elizabethan Life: Home, Work & Land,” (1976) F. G. Emmison quotes a will from Essex England: “Thomas Quilter of Great Dunmow”, who combines the twin crafts of joiner and turner, divides his “working tools” equally between his two sons, giving each “a turning lathe and a grindstone unhanged.” The elder son is to have the larger grindstone if he will teach his brother “joining and turning in the best manner he can.””
This obscure family of ours was early in the Reformation, and continued Protestants through the reign of Queen Mary, when they were sometimes in danger of trouble on account of their zeal against popery. They had got an English Bible, and to conceal and secure it, it was fastened open with tapes under and within the cover of a joint-stool. When my great-great-grandfather read it to his family, he turned up the joint-stool upon his knees, turning over the leaves then under the tapes. One of the children stood at the door to give notice if he saw the apparitor coming, who was an officer of the spiritual court. In that case the stool was turned down again upon its feet, when the Bible remained concealed under it as before. This anecdote I had from my uncle Benjamin.
— Peter Follansbee, one of the authors of “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree,” coming soon from Lost Art Press, Jennie Alexander and Follansbee. (Illustration at top: Eleanor Underhill; photos: Peter Follansbee.)
Writing table for Maximilian Emanuel, elector of Bavaria, 1715.
One of my friends teaches a freshman composition class at a university. At the beginning of every class she hands out an index card to each student and asks them to write down the answer to this question: What do you hope to gain from this class?
Sometimes looks can be deceiving. Megan Fitzpatrick, the managing editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine, says she’s a 14-year-old boy trapped in the body of a 43-year-old-woman.
Wait, I shouldn’t tell that story.
Sometimes looks can be deceiving. To the outside world, Megan sometimes looks like the “I Can Do That” spokeswoman. It’s true that she’s probably built more “I Can Do That” projects than anyone. But that’s not because those are the only things she can build.
Close observers of the magazine know that she has built some big case pieces with lots of hand-cut dovetails, cove moulding and inset doors and drawers. But only the people who work with her know the whole story.
Megan is one of the more ambitious woodworkers I know. She always picks projects above her skill level in some way and then pesters seeks out the knowledge to build them. That’s how she learned dovetailing, inlay, sharpening, you name it.
While that might not sound so unusual, she also is ruthless persistent about learning everything about a topic. When she wanted to learn dovetails, I think she asked everyone in the office at Popular Woodworking Magazine to teach her separately. Then she’d compare the techniques and forge her own path.
In December, Megan decided to build a spice box with line-and-berry inlay as a gift for her mother. You can read the harrowing tale here. Bottom line: I hope Megan will be able to show off more of her highbrow skills – other than iambic pentameter – in the coming years.
It’s easy in this male-dominated business for some people to see women in the craft as window dressing, as has been the case on certain home-improvement television shows (I’m looking at you, Dean). Don’t buy into that with Megan, or you are liable to get a roundhouse kick in the ear.
I was first introduced to the Schwarz Media Conglomerate on Jan. 10, 2008, with the announcement that we were collaborating on an annotated translation of sections from Roubo’s “L’Art du Menuisier.” The two-year anniversary of that announcement happens to also be a much more important milestone for me as it marks exactly the 40th year of my entrance into the furniture trades. Looking back down the tunnel of those four decades is an exhilarating experience.
I was a high school kid working in a warehouse because it paid more than slinging burgers. Because it was a 25 percent raise, I showed up for work at 1 p.m., Jan. 10, 1972. The job was exactly as promised; all I had to do was keep three warehouses clean for a large commercial furniture store.
I soon discovered the little repair shop in the corner of one of the warehouses, manned periodically by Frank Tautzenberger. How a retired Hungarian house painter became the furniture repairman for a multimillion dollar furniture store is beyond me, and truth be told some of his structural repairs were sketchy, but when it came to matching appearances he was simply a genius. On the days when he was in the shop I found myself literally running through the warehouse to get my chores done in order to spend time with him. watching him make it seem effortless. Imagine the voice of Bela Lugosi telling you over and over, “See, it’s just like this. Easy.”
That experience led me to a number of refinishing and restoration shops over the next few years, punctuated by some time in college. I was on a special program that allowed me to enter college as a junior, on the fast track to law school. But always the lure of working in a shop kept tugging at me, and to this day I can hear the disapproving tones of my adviser, Dr. Stetson, 18 months later after I informed her of my withdrawing from school.
“But Don, there is just no future in the crafts.”
I think she might have been wrong about that one….
I have recounted some of my experiences in the shop of the Schindler’s, but not of one acquaintance who also shaped my career. Nicky Hlopoff was one of the most renowned art conservators in the world, and when he was working for clients in Palm Beach he stopped by Schindler’s for frequent visits. With his encouragement I began focusing on moving toward a career in preserving historic furniture. But still I was only part way down the tunnel.
After another unsuccessful attempt at college, this time as an architecture student, I wound up as the assistant patternmaker of a small custom foundry. It was there where I learned what precise and fearless woodworking was all about, especially large-scale turning. The lathe axle was about throat height and the 10-horsepower motor made sure nothing slowed the workpiece, which was often so large (we were making patterns for giant pumps used in dredging) that I was literally part-way inside the pattern while I was turning it. The first time, my boss Johnny Kuzma simply handed me the chisel and said, “Good luck, kid.” Gazing up at the pockmarks where countless chisels had been dislodged from the hands of timid turners and embedded into the ceiling, I grabbed the chisel with a death grip and dove in. Whenever anyone brags to about turning something big, I ask if they have ever turned a 10’-diameter bowl.
After a final and successful attempt at college, I got my current dream job 28 years ago, which has allowed me to pursue a nearly limitless menu of curiosities and opportunities.
Which brings me to the title of this essay. Long before I had ever heard of Popular Woodworking, much less Chris Schwarz or Lost Art Press, I was re-thinking my acquisitive impulses. Better tools. Fewer tools (well, maybe not really fewer tools, and I have not yet come to the place of discarding superfluous tools). Desire to get increasingly serious about scholarship and my skills. That path has been immensely pleasing.
Like many of my fellow galoots, after 40 years I was even reconsidering the need for a table saw. In the end I decided to keep mine, in part because it is a big, heavy machine that does some things nothing else can do, and to remove it from my tiny basement workshop would require recruiting a large number of stout young men to get it up the narrow stairs. Besides, what would I do with the space if I got rid of it? I would probably put an assembly table there. How is that different than a nice table saw with a piece of Baltic birch plywood on it?
Table saw: a machine with side benefits. So I’m keeping it.
That just about sums up the acquired wisdom of 40 years in the furniture trades.
