You can now purchase “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” – complete and unabridged – for your Kindle, iPad or any other reader that accepts ePub files.
The price is $16. You can purchase the Kindle edition here. The ePub version for iPad iPhone and other ePub reader is here.
Like all our electronic products, these are supplied without any form of Digital Rights Management – DRM for short. DRM restricts you from moving the file to other devices, or requires a password, or is just generally a nuisance.
We do not care for DRM. And I am pleased to say that pirating of our products has been minimal. So thank you for being ethical citizens.
“The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” was a complex book for us to convert into an electronic edition, thanks to the hundreds of illustrations and the copious footnotes. I am happy to report that the book is complete with all the footnotes – you access them by clicking on the superscript number in the text. You will then be taken to a section of the book containing all the notes. The function works quite well.
One last note: Several customers have asked if we will be offering package prices on the book, electronic book and the forthcoming audiobook version read by Roy Underhill. After much debate, we have decided to keep all these products separate and simply offer each at the best price possible. We think $16 is a fair price for a DRM-free book of this complexity.
The act of naming something is, in my view, a kind of violence. But it also is a helpful form of shorthand.
With furniture, the most common way to name it is by its ornament (Chippendale, Arts & Crafts, Ikea). This name gives us a rough idea of what it looks like, perhaps when it was built and maybe even some of its construction details (mahogany, through-tenons, confirmat screws).
But what if the piece of furniture doesn’t really have much ornament? What if we are unsure as to when it was built? What if the piece appears in the furniture record made out of every conceivable hardwood and softwood?
What do we call this furniture? One term is “vernacular,” though that word casts a net that’s too wide. Vernacular encompasses 15th-century trestle tables with wedged through-tenons and pine shelves assembled with drywall screws in a mall kiosk.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about furniture on an X/Y axis. The X axis is ornament, from no ornament to all ornament (think Grinling Gibbons). The Y axis is construction quality, from bombproof to being a bomb ready to explode when the humidity changes.
This X/Y axis creates four spaces and four kinds of furniture, and it gives us a sliding scale that we can use to discuss how furniture is made. Let’s talk about these four types.
1. Furniture of the rich who have taste – high-style ornamentation and outstanding joinery. This is almost always the furniture of the well-to-do. This category encompasses furniture from every era, from the Middle Ages up to five minutes ago. It’s period highboys from Thomas Chippendale. Prairie settees from Frank Lloyd Wright. Rockers from Sam Maloof. This is furniture that is built by commission – not manufactured. It is made by the best artisans by the people who can afford it. Its ornamentation might not be ostentatious, but it is still incredibly evident, distinctive and expensive to produce (think James Krenov). The furniture is also – for lack of a better word – specific and not vague. It represents the focused efforts of the builder and the customer to produce something unique.
2. Furniture of the poseurs – high-style ornamentation and crap craftsmanship. This is the world of Ethan Allen, Williams-Sonoma, Baker (and many other commercial manufacturers) who seek to provide furniture that looks like it belongs to the very rich at a price that the upper-middle class can afford. In general, this is the furniture that looks good (even great) from a distance but fails when examined closely. Wood selection is terrible. The finish is more obscuring than revealing of the grain. The interior components of the furniture are generic and have more in common with mass-manufactured furniture. Dovetails are made by machine. Mortise-and-tenon joinery is via cope-and-stick (at best). But most of all, it is manufactured – the parts are interchangeable with other pieces from the same run. And the detailing is, in general, somewhat generic. It is designed to appeal to thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of customers – not just one customer. So these pieces are never polarizing and almost always like melba toast: pleasant but not memorable.
3. Furniture of the desperate – furniture built only on price. With these pieces, style and craftsmanship are subsumed by the bottom line. This is the particleboard furniture covered in plastic veneer that looks like oak (if you have been drinking). It is designed only to hit a price point and provide a temporary function. It is constructed in a way that it will survive only about five years or one significant family move before becoming too wobbly to keep. It is designed by the opportunistic to fill the temporary needs of the desperate.
4. Furniture of necessity – high craftsmanship and low (to non-existent) ornament. This is the furniture of people who require, demand or desire durability and have no need for ornament or high-style detail. The most important aspect of this class of furniture is that it be useful, durable and able to remain attractive (or non-offensive) over a long period of time. Examples of this furniture: Institutional or work furniture, military furniture, servant-quarters furniture, school furniture, traveling furniture, library furniture, and (most of all) furniture made for and by craftsmen for their own use. While ornament is not entire eschewed, it is always secondary to the function and durability of the finished object.
So I know that the above classification is flawed. It doesn’t account for some outliers – low craftsmen who build bonnet-top highboys for their homes. The extremely rich who are content to furnish their homes from WalMart. The occasional piece of manufactured furniture that is transcendental – Eames chairs, Stella cafe chairs and so forth.
But it is better than calling anything that lacks carving as: Shaker.
This morning I mailed two Roorkhee chairs to customers on either side of the continent. It was a bit of a bittersweet job. I’m glad to have these chairs completed and out of the house. But the kids liked sitting in them, and I became enamored with them for some surprising reasons.
For one, they are damn comfortable – as comfy as a Morris chair. And they look good with our traditional/modernist furniture. But that’s not where my affection ends.
This week, my daughter Katy and I have been humping these chairs all over the city to photograph them – across parking lots, through parks and in and out of cars. I carried one of these chairs with one hand and while loaded with a complete photography and lighting rig. Even Katy was able to tote one of these chairs all day without any complaint – each chair weighs about 10 or 11 lbs.
And when it came time to pack them up to their final destinations, all the leather, brass and wood fit into a box measuring just 24” x 12” x 6”. With the packing material, the box weighed between 13 and 14 lbs. I could have packed them into an even smaller box if UPS had carried the right size.
Within a few minutes of packing up these chairs, I received two more orders for them.
I’m going to make only one more run of these chairs this year – I have books to edit, lay out and write. So if you want me to make one of these chairs for you, my recommendation is for your to make them for yourself. They are incredibly easy to construct, and my plans for them will be published in a fall issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine.
But if making them doesn’t interest you (bovine phobia?), here are the details for this last run of 2012:
• The chairs will be in genuine mahogany, finished with garnet shellac, just like the chairs shown above.
• All the hardware is solid brass or steel and aged to look vintage.
• On leather, I’ll offer a choice of colors for this run that ranges from the cognac color shown above to a rich black.
• The depth and width of the seat can be customized for you – the originals were quite narrow (about 16″ between the legs). The current run has about 17-1/2″ between the legs for “modern” hips. And I can go to about 19″ before engineering becomes an issue.
• The chairs are $750 each, delivered in the United States.
As a photographer, nothing makes me happier than a cloudy day.
Clouds are the world’s most effective, least expensive and least predictable diffusers. They mute shadows, mellow colors and reduce contrast. Why am I telling this to a bunch of woodworkers? Well, as a magazine editor I received hundreds of “print my article” submissions that featured a beautiful highboy in a grassy setting with full sun.
I know what these guys were thinking. Taking the photo outdoors allowed them to use a fast shutter speed and small aperture without a tripod. It also made the furniture look unnatural, like a wookie in a thong. All the details of their piece are hidden in shadow (actually a good thing with thonged wookie pics). All the corners are blown out in high relief.
If you take photos of your work, buy a tripod. Period. Buy a good one (look for used Italian ones on Craigslist). Get a shutter release cable for your camera. Use a medium aperture (like f8) and let the shutter go as slow as it wants. Some photos I take require a three-second shutter speed.
And, if you are going to shoot outside, make sure your project belongs outside (birdhouse, planter, punji stick trap for opossums) and wait for a cloudy day – or shoot at first light in the morning or at last light in the evening so the light is more diffuse.
Today I took some photos of my Roorkhee chairs before sending them out to their new homes. The photos in the morning were with full sun and were a disaster – I was trying to find some dappled shade. After dinner I went out under some full cloud cover and tried again.
Come on children and gather ‘round, and let me tell you a secret about a Frenchman renowned.
Ready?
The manuscripts of Roubo were not perfect. Shhh.
I admit it, right now I am simply taking a moment to escape the gut-grinding work of polishing words, backfilling those areas where old J.A. didn’t tell us everything he knew, or at least didn’t tell us everything we wanted to know. In addition to hundreds of editorial comments inserted into the text, in order to mitigate the passages where the reader will likely scratch their head and say, “Huh?” I wrote almost a score of additional explanatory essays to fill in some of those voids. While these have been roughly done for some time, it is only lately that we have begun to add the visual descriptions to go with my verbal explanations.
Making the process even more tedious is my own ambivalence to the world of photography. It’s just not a bug I ever caught. While I truly appreciate skillful and creative photographic imagery (for example I am literally agog sometimes at the artworks emerging from the back end of Narayan Nayar’s camera when he is shooting the H.O. Studley tool cabinet) if you absolutely positively needed a great photo, I would not be the first person to call.
Still, with copious counsel from Chris and Wesley Tanner, the book’s designer, we are on the way to completion. The lights are in place, the reference color bar is included, the cameras are on their tripods and the exercises are being replicated. Lights. Camera. Action. Or more precisely given the often slow shutter speeds in my grotto, “Lights, Camera, Inaction.” We don’t keep track of the pictures we are taking, but a rough estimate would be a bazillion. It is all glamour, all the time.
The final result is most gratifying as it emerges from the cramped cave-like quarters of my basement workshop (by comparison Chris’s workshop is positively capacious), and integrated into the essay text. In the end this process represents beautifully our vision for “To Make As Perfectly As Possible.” As meaningful an accomplishment as a scholarly translation would be, it might be little more than a historical curiosity on a dusty library shelf if left alone. Instead we want these volumes to inform and transform you as an artist. We hope that my extra 15,000 words and Michele’s 125 photographs – added to the 94,000 words and almost 350 engravings from Roubo – help do just that.
Like all our electronic products, these are supplied without any form of Digital Rights Management – DRM for short. DRM restricts you from moving the file to other devices, or requires a password, or is just generally a nuisance.
