For the man who best understands furniture is the man who makes it and sees in it more than the chair he sits on, or the bed he sleeps in, but as something which possesses in itself quite a bit of his inheritance as a citizen of an ancient civilisation that has evolved through the centuries through sober moments and fine and even fantastic moments, til it has reached the precise point of time when he himself gave it just that little extra adaptation or that slight variation of line which seals it as his own contribution to the story.
I am somewhat amused ex post by the parallels between our first conversations about creating “To Make As Perfectly As Possible” and Roubo’s struggles to create a set of volumes that people would actually purchase. His success is pretty self evident in that we still find his work compelling after two-and-a-half centuries. It certainly sets a high bar for us in bringing him to new generations.
— Don Williams
One of the biggest obstacles that I have had to overcome is the cry of the public against big books, which they won’t buy because they are too expensive, or they buy but don’t read because they are too voluminous. But how could I do otherwise? Should I fool the Public in pandering to their taste but against their interests by giving them an abridged and consequently less expensive edition, but where they will learn nothing, or at the most only words or names of the arts? (*)
(*) What I say here is the incontestable truth: nothing has done more wrong to the sciences and the Arts, than the condensed abridged editions that have been given to workers already, or even the new works done in this manner. I therefore believe it wise to give to my work all the expanse appropriate, at least as far as my strength has permitted me, in order to be useful in the present and for the future by not obliging the Public to make a double expense, as happens every day, with the increases and revisions that one makes to most of the works where there are multiple editions thus augmented, which becomes very costly and still remains quite imperfect.
What’s more, it is not possible, for as little as this work has been read, provided that one be of good faith and without prejudice – it is not possible, I say, to not confirm that the details of the different types of woodworking is immense. However concise it be in detail, it must still be considerable. It is not the work that is in question here, like history or fantasy, where one is content to expose facts to the eyes of the reader or to amuse him, but where one leaves him the liberty to make application of what he has read, in not preventing him from his own judgment, which would become boring to the reasonable reader.
Here, on the contrary, and in the description of all the arts in general, where it is a question of teaching, one must not only tell everything, but tell how it is done, and why it is done. Showing the different ways of operating every day, and in making visible the advantages and the disadvantages, and the situations where one method is preferable to another, requires describing the minutiae of works of art, whether whole or in part.
Here’s a dirty secret: If it weren’t for my job at a woodworking magazine, I’d be almost unemployable.
I cannot sit for more than a few hours at a time. During long meetings and dinner parties, I’ve been known to just stand up and rudely leave the room. My legs feel like involuntary muscles when that happens.
So thank goodness for our shop at Popular Woodworking Magazine and my shop at home. I can abandon whatever sit-down task I’m working on and sharpen my tools, cut some moulding or work on the project on my bench.
On Thursday I had – no exaggeration – more than 200 e-mails to catch up with. After slaving on that all morning at the office, I shut down all the programs on my computer and decided to build a prototype of a shelving unit I spied in a French book on handplanes (see the story here).
It was just what my head and hands needed. I had some dry yellow pine 2x12s in our rack that were fairly clear. And I got down to work. I had only enough pine to build a 50-1/2″-long version of the rack – the one I designed is more than 70″ long. And I screwed the prototype together – the real one will have through-tenons etc. But this prototype will tell me how well it holds and dispenses tools and if it looks ungainly.
I wiped on some finish on Friday morning and hung it before lunch in my shop at home. I’ll probably put my shop-reference books on top of the shelf today and hang my two miter saws on the pegs so my miter boxes will take up less space below the bench.
I do like the way it looks on the wall. But looks go only so far.
Little wonder that after a short time the beginner in woodwork experiences a familiarity with his tools that not all his preliminary blunderings can quench. It comes not from the moment of time in which he experiments but way back through countless generations of his forbears to the unknown men who had nothing but their tools between them and bodily and defensive needs, having at the same time the urge to create and enjoy the thing they had created.
When the hand of modern man closes round a tool it is in the old traditional manner and in no time at all he finds himself falling into the rhythm of working action. Skill itself can only come with experience, but the potential skill is there, craving for an outlet.
I’ve been working on my next book, “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” since February 2010. But it has been brewing inside me for much longer than that.
When I first let slip that I was working on this book, I was in Germany, teaching a class of a dozen Europeans and Americans how to work wood by hand. We were sitting at lunch around a table when I told them the title of the book.
Everyone in the room laughed.
Then, after a moment, it got quite quiet. One of the Germans in our group – a quiet man with excellent hand skills – spoke up.
“I don’t think that’s a good title,” he said. “Anarchism does not have a good name here.”
The rest of the students nodded their heads. One of them piped up:
“It might be better to call it the ‘Practical Tool Chest,’ ” he suggested. “At least in Europe.”
When I returned to the United States, I weighed their advice against my gut. I’m not a political person. I would rather talk about almost anything than politics. In fact, covering politics and business and government as a newspaper journalist is what soured me on… everything.
So I decided to go with my gut. The book might make you uncomfortable. The ideas inside it might make you dislike me. But in my heart, I know that most woodworkers are “aesthetic anarchists.” This short movie shows some construction details of my chest and has my two favorite quotes about anarchism. If you have trouble viewing the video, click here.
