The following is excerpted from “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley,” by Donald C. Williams, Photographs by Narayan Nayar. Note: In the book, this chapter includes many more images of the astounding details in this storied tool cabinet.
My late colleague and dear friend Melvin J. Wachowiak, Jr. once remarked that anything made more elegantly than necessary for its usefulness was Art. By that assessment, with which I agree, the Studley tool cabinet is unrestrained Art. There are a multitude of visual and physical moments in the cabinet that did not need to be there. Their presence is either to aesthetically enhance the whole, or to demonstrate the maker’s virtuosity at his craft and his delight in it.
The scale and density of the decorative details in the Studley cabinet limited each element, especially the inlays, to about a quarter the size of a postage stamp.
The Inlays To a modern woodworker the tool cabinet might seem opulent, even garish, but in the late-Victorian world of organ and piano building, the exuberance made sense. The material vocabulary is what you would expect for a palette of inlays on a piano-maker’s toolbox: ivory, ebony and mother-of-pearl. The inlay techniques Studley used on the cabinet were straightforward and exacting. For the round, button-like inlays he likely used a drill bit to excavate the pockets. The inlays vary in size, but most are in the range of 1/4″ in diameter plus or minus, with a few in the 1/8″-diameter range.
Almost all of the 136 ivory inlays are buttons or roundels.
On the right side of the cabinet, where Studley located sets of graduated drill bits, he marked the sets not only with engraved flat ivory roundels but also with half-spherical ivory buttons.
The 217 mother-of-pearl inlays are more evenly divided between buttons and roundels, and pieces of other shapes (alas, I did not conduct a count on that distribution). The shaped pieces were “made to fit,” but there is no way to identify which came first, the void or the infill.
Typically intarsia (a technique by which pieces are literally “inset” into a background) is accomplished by first creating the decorative element, then creating a void to fit that element by scribing the outline of the element on the background and excavating a void. My microscopic examination of the inlays was cursory and inconclusive, but
I did not see any tool marks on the background surfaces.
Regardless of their material or shape, on all but a few of the inlays there are no irregularities until extreme magnification is employed.
The opulence of using ivory buttons, inscribed with inked numbers to mark the progression of tool sizes (for example, the graduations of the drill bits) is awe-inspiring.
There is place for every drill bit in the graduated set, and an engraved ivory button for each drill bit. Also take note of the subtle but elegant treatment of the bottoms of the spacers between each Gothic arch; the curved double-chamfer is found in numerous locations throughout the cabinet, almost never glaringly obvious.
Concurrently, the mother-of-pearl elements used as mere decoration impart an intense luminescence to the cabinet, especially as the light or the viewing position changes.
The Sculpted Details The strictly sculptural elements of the cabinet, by which I mean those that are rendered and presented to the viewer in three dimensions, number literally in the hundreds. Because it is not possible to rank them in importance or even prominence, I will cluster them into four major areas.
First are the roundels, turned button-like elements scattered throughout the cabinet, never haphazard and always enhancing adjacent elements. There are many different sizes of roundels, ranging from about 3/8″ to 1-1/2″ in diameter. Most, but not all, of the roundels are festooned with round mother-of-pearl inlays at their tips, about which I will speak more in a bit. Each of the roughly two dozen roundels is turned from solid ebony.
Closely related to the roundels are the drawer pulls and stopper buttons at the ends of the metal tubes containing tools. I include these 17 examples here because, like the roundels, they are small, turned ebony elements.
The technical and artistic complexity of this one element is astonishing. The turned ebony plugs for the nickel-plated tube (there is one at each end) are adjacent to a series of ebony and mother-of-pearl roundels mounted on sculpted ebony backplates. To carry the power of the accomplishment even further, the swinging tab that restrains the tube in its shaped wire fitting is a spectacular carved ebony “L” with tapered chamfers on both sides of the two curves.
Second are the shaped decorative elements, which are further subdivided into those that are 1) functionally similar to the roundels in that they are applied to the background, or 2) movable tabs or catches used to restrain tools. Most of these from either category are further enhanced by mother-of-pearl inlays and reflect the element outline as a whole.
Of the first group, numbering roughly 90, many serve to frame a space but others are demarcations between tools belonging to a graduated set, such as the chisels and drill bits. The second group consists of about 50 ebony tabs.
The third type of sculptural enhancements are carved elements serving as stand-alone sculptures in their own right. The most prominent of these is the drop pendant that tops the arch above the niche containing the Stanley No. 1 plane. The detail on this element is breathtaking, all the more so when you consider its scale; it is roughly the size of a dime. There are only a dozen or so of these examples in the case, but they are spectacular and attention-grabbing.
The carved ebony capitol from the Masonic vignette is approximately the size of a nickel.
The final widespread instance of sculptural exercises in the cabinet includes the arches and their buttresses, most notably around the set of four awls above the Masonic symbol, along with those around the chisels and the two sets of drill bits, which are in the upper right portion of the cabinet on the second and third layers. The arch-and-buttress vignette framing the awls takes its place proudly among the most beautifully designed and crafted artworks I have ever seen.
Quantifying precisely the inventory of these decorative details is nearly impossible (is it a series of a dozen arches, or is it a single element of an ascending set of arches?) and frankly not especially useful. But because you asked, I number the total of individual decorative elements to be in excess of 500.
I make no apologies for being captivated by this compartment in the Studley cabinet. The composition and execution are flawless and, like many of the details in the cabinet, can only be fully appreciated when the tools are removed.
Perhaps the most gifted craftsman I know recently replicated a single inlaid mother-of-pearl and ebony element from Studley’s cabinet and found it to be a vexing and time-consuming effort. If we fixate on the Herculean labors of Studley we might become obsessed with the mechanistic minutiae of envisioning and fabricating hundreds of stylistic touches, each consuming some quantity of a superb craftsman’s time.
Instead I ask you to think of them – and the case itself – as a unified cornucopia in which the whole is infinitely more affecting than a summation of the magnificent individual components.
This independent bookstore is run by Gregory Kornbluh, and we are thrilled to work with him to make our books available to locals.
When we decided to cut back on the number of days the storefront will be open in 2020 (only June 13 and Dec. 14, 2020), we started looking for a local bookstore to carry our titles. Many times people come through town and ask us: Where can I buy your books?
The funny thing is that Greg found us. He had attended one of our open days at the Covington storefront and then approached me at a Built to Spill concert earlier this year. As he had good taste in music, we were eager to see if that carried over to books (it did).
Only Indies
People ask why we sell only through independent stores – and not Amazon. It’s simple: Amazon is not friendly to small publishers. It slashes prices to the bone so it has the lowest price on the planet (sometimes to where it loses money on the sale) and then it sucks up all the sales. And then you basically work for Amazon.
No thanks.
You actually can buy our books on Amazon through resellers who jack the prices up to crazy heights, looking for a sucker. “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is currently listed there for $111. “Virtuoso” is there for just $599.50. We cannot stop this; it’s the caveat emptor part of a free market economy.
Yoav’s drawing for his knockdown table “Merritt,” made with reclaimed materials, inspired by the Merritt Parkway
Imagine this: You’re a teacher of woodworking. Your students are kids. The school where you teach is in a big city, and most of your students live nearby. It’s March 2020: Your school, along with much of the rest of the world, shuts down in response to the pandemic. But your job is to go on teaching. What do you do?
A typical fourth-grade project is a walking stick made from a branch
One of Yoav’s sixth-grade students
A typical sixth-grade project: a saw
This is the reality that hit Yoav Liberman three months ago. His students and their families were in lockdown, confined to their homes in New York City, which has suffered some of the world’s highest numbers of infection and death from Covid-19. Instead of teaching face-to-face in a workshop at Manhattan’s Rudolf Steiner school, as he has for the past eight years, he was expected to teach remotely, via computer screen. “How do I participate in this in a meaningful way?” he wondered, aware that his students lacked access not just to workbenches and woodworking tools, but also to lumber. With parks closed, and few trees on the streets, “even getting them a branch would be almost impossible.”
Fortunately for Yoav’s students, their teacher has a lifetime’s experience of turning challenges into opportunities.
Yoav with his father, Eliezer, and brother, Dan
Yoav was born on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Israel, and has one younger brother, Dan. His dad, Eliezer, was a machinist, handyman and maritime officer who worked as chief engineer on a merchant ship. Thanks to his position, Eliezer could bring his family along in the summers; Yoav recalls two-month voyages from Haifa to the Mediterranean, then on to America and Canada. It was the late 1960s. Ships were small. The world was not connected as it is today. “Those voyages are a very important part of my childhood memories,” he says. They might stop in Athens, where they’d pay a quick visit to the Acropolis, then in a day they’d be in Florence. Another day would pass and they were in Marseilles; then they’d cross the Atlantic. In addition to providing a dazzling introduction to different landscapes and architectural styles, those vacations opened Yoav’s eyes to the world of engineering and mechanics. “I was seeing the world not from a luxurious point, but from a merchant ship perspective,” he explains – and as often as not, he was immersed in the guts of the ship, because it was his father’s job to keep things running, through storms as well as calm seas.
Liberman ancestors in Czechoslovakia, 1930s. Yoav’s father is at far right.
Yoav’s maternal grandparents
When Yoav was 6, his father died, an experience that had a powerful effect on the course of his life. Aside from the emotional wounds caused by such a loss, especially at a young age, he and his family were forced to learn a multitude of new skills. His mother (today, a retired school teacher) and grandfather were now responsible for fixing things around the house. Yoav has a vivid recollection of watching his mom mix epoxy. “In other homes the only glue that people used to use was silly contact cement, [but] my mom kept two epoxy tubes that my dad got from one of his trips to the USA and taught her how to use.”
Yoav with his maternal grandfather
“I was not such a good student in elementary school,” he says. “My mom said that I ‘withered inward’ after my dad died. Without any academic achievements to be proud of, I was destined to attend a vocational high school, which actually ended up as a godsend. With a curriculum that included machining, plastic and polymer studies, robotics and electronics, and most importantly, technical drawing, I was in heaven. At home I [built] scale models of ships and planes, and in school I leaned over a metal lathe to turn a hammer head or held an acetylene torch to build a small garden stool.”
Like all able-bodied Israeli citizens, Yoav did a compulsory stint in the armed forces – in his case, the navy – then considered going on to higher education. He didn’t want to study pure engineering, but he wanted to do something involving art that would also be functional. There were no furniture making programs in Israel at the time, so he thought “I’ll just try architecture. You design buildings and furniture, get training that’s lofty in terms of art and principles of design but also down-to-earth training in materials and construction.”
The summer before he started his studies at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), he worked for a family friend who had a woodshop. The work was low-level and mundane, but that shop launched him on his lifelong project of collecting wood scraps and other materials that most people throw away.
With his mother, Ruth (lower right), aunt, uncle and cousins, mid-1990s
Yoav completed a five-year program in architecture at Technion. It was the early 1990s, before widespread publishing on the internet. His teachers were architects, not woodworkers. To get his woodshop fix he subscribed to Fine Woodworking and devoured the content. As his interest in woodworking grew, so did his collection of tools.
After graduation he “gave architecture a chance,” as he puts it, by working at a couple of small firms. But he spent his spare time building and restoring furniture. While he enjoyed some of the sketching and 3-D work in his architectural apprenticeship, he was put off by the layers of mediation between the clients, the work and himself. “You’re so remote,” he explains. “There are so many hurdles to jump over. So much red tape. Some are completely justified, [though] as a junior architect you’re even more remote. But working on furniture is so in tune. [You’re] so in touch with the material and the processes. It’s fulfilling.” An invitation to teach a class in furniture refurbishing and design at a small DIY center in Tel Aviv proved pivotal. “I was much more interested in that than in working in front of the computer to compile square footages for a building my boss designed.”
During his apprenticeship Yoav had also taught architecture, drawing and design as an adjunct professor at a community college. He kept that work going and began writing about furniture for a DIY magazine in Israel, as well as teaching classes in furniture refurbishing.
Yoav
In the late ’90s Yoav’s (now-former) partner moved to Cambridge, Mass., to begin work toward a doctorate at Harvard. While visiting his partner, Yoav discovered the Worcester Center for Crafts; he made some inquiries and showed them his portfolio. Impressed, they accepted him as an artist in residence and sponsored his student visa. “It was a dream,” says Yoav. “The magazines were from New England, and many of the people [whose articles] I read were working in the Boston area.” It felt like destiny.
Yoav moved to Massachusetts in 2000. He lived in Cambridge and commuted to Worcester. His job: to build a meaningful body of work. He worked long days, grateful for access to the school’s resources and the opportunity to think about things he wanted to build. He also took classes in turning, jewelry making and glass. Looking back, he says, “I was in Candy Land.”
His collection of salvaged materials grew; he was constantly thinking about how to save stuff from being destroyed or thrown away. Reclaimed materials became the hallmark of his work. The city of Worcester contributed to his stash: He scored a bunch of heart pine beams from a mill that had been demolished for a highway. The firewood bin at the craft school provided riches, too. As Yoav saw it, “I was happy not to allow this material to be lost to the landfill but regain respect from its users or viewers for as long as the furniture I built would last.”
He sought out other teachers and found his way to the Powderhouse Woodworkers – Mitch Ryerson, John Everdell, Judy Kensley McKie and Nathan Rome, who had set up a co-op in an old millwork building rented from Tufts University; there was a communal machine space and kitchen, with open studios. Each member of the co-op had his or her own style. Yoav worked with John and Mitch; he particularly admired John for the complexity and variety of materials with which he worked and calls him “a virtuoso in using bronze and copper and stone and ebony.” Yoav wrote an article about John for Woodwork magazine.
Yoav apprenticed with the group on and off for about six years. Asked how he made a living, he replies: “My partner got a stipend from Harvard. We lived in a grad dorm. I was riding my bike to my mentors’ studio. We survived on his stipend plus my savings and some family support. We were very frugal. Officially I was a student, so I was not supposed to work.” (He has since been granted a green card.)
Those years overlapped with other work. After finishing his residency in Worcester, Yoav found himself without a studio, but he was offered an artist in residence/tutorial position at Harvard’s Eliot House, which had a shop in the basement. There he would mentor students from Harvard who wanted to learn woodworking He created a program of instruction and launched an annual furniture show, took students on field trips and invited fellow woodworkers and speakers, such as Tom Lie-Nielsen and Albert LeCoff, to give presentations. The affiliation with Harvard opened other doors; he was invited to write a blog for American Woodworker; he wrote articles for Woodwork magazine; he pursued his own furniture projects. This was toward the end of 2009.
For four years he also taught three-month stints in furniture design, sometimes with cardboard as the primary material, for college interior and industrial design programs in Israel.
Light fixture by student at Shenkar in Israel (Photo: Sasha Flit)
Open storage by student at Shenkar in Israel (Photo: Sasha Flit)
Around 2010 he was accepted to an artist in residence program at Purchase College. It was a prestigious position that came with a studio, stipend, room and board in exchange for teaching one class and spending the rest of his time on his own work. He calls the experience “formidable” and says that during those four months he built his most important body of work to date.
“Attn: John Everdell” is a campaign-style piece inspired by the form of a highboy. It incorporates salvaged boards from a packing crate addressed to Yoav’s mentor, John Everdell
“Merritt,” assembled (Photo: Bill Hoo)
“Merritt,” knocked down (Photo: Bill Hoo)
“Ascent” (Photo: Bill Hoo)
Just as that residency was drawing to a close, he met James, a psychologist in private practice, who is now his partner. “James is also a wonderful bread maker, knitter and gardener,” Yoav adds.
James, Asher and Yoav
When American Woodworker was bought by Popular Woodworking, Yoav met Megan Fitzpatrick. He’d been thinking about writing a book about building furniture with reclaimed wood; Megan was enthusiastic and had Scott Francis, her books editor, get in touch to discuss possibilities. “That was an affirmation by two people I appreciate,” he says. “If she thinks it’s a good idea, I will put the time into it.” He wanted the book to include work by others as well as his own – people from all over the world, in different disciplines. “The purpose is to let us pause a little and think, how can we utilize any sort of discarded material that has still so much potential? Sometimes the potential exceeds that of virgin-cut wood.”
Yoav spent two years working on the book, “Working with Reclaimed Wood,” which was published in 2018. By then he had made a home with James in the greater New York City region, adopted their son, Asher, who is now 5, and was working at his current job as a teacher of woodworking in the city. Ordinarily, he commutes four days a week.
So here’s how Yoav faced his reality this past March.
He started with a process of elimination: What kind of woodworking-related activity can you do with your hands when you don’t have access to woodworking tools? He thought back to the design classes he’d taught in Israel, where students built pieces out of corrugated cardboard. It’s made from wood. It’s a readily available material – in fact, with so many parents confined to home and ordering products online instead of shopping in stores, there’s been an excess of cardboard to dispose of. And all you need to work with cardboard are scissors. (If you really want to go wild, Yoav adds, you could splurge on a $5 utility knife.)
His next challenge was to come up with a project that would be appropriate for each of the grades. He consulted the students’ other teachers. Fourth-graders were studying local geography; in Manhattan, that means skyscrapers. So Yoav decided to have his fourth-grade students make the Empire State Building. He found some plans of the building online, made a cutting list and templates, then sent the kit to parents to print out. Now the kids are making the building, right down to the spire and antenna. (You can read Yoav’s blog post about the project here.) He meets with students for half an hour a week via Zoom; sometimes he tutors individuals. “It’s such a shift in teaching,” he says, acknowledging the irony of the situation. “[Ordinarily] we say ‘No screens, no electronics!’”
The fifth-grade students are making animals – panthers, a dolphin, a penguin, a whale. Each student brings her or his own interpretation of the material to the project. For example, one wanted to sand the edges but had no sandpaper; she used her mother’s nail file instead.
Ninth-graders are tackling more complicated designs. They started with a box-jointed cardboard box. (Did you get that?) After that they moved on to furniture. Yoav has encouraged them to use notched designs, which can be elegant. Other designs involve layering the cardboard for stability. Origami, he notes, provides yet another way to think about using cardboard as a furniture-making material.
Adapting to new circumstances. Whale, bear, Empire State Building and tools, including a laptop and camera.
As they near semester’s end, Yoav has been teaching the older students (and some of their parents, who couldn’t resist getting involved) to carve simple designs in basswood purchased online – decorative patterns, animals, letters – with a carving knife. Constantly thinking about how to keep them from cutting their fingers, Yoav recommended that they invest in mesh tape. “You sit in front of a camera,” he explains; “the student is miles away from you.”
Odds are, he’s inspiring a new generation of makers who will design and build innovative furnishings out of this abundant waste material, cardboard.
UNITY (2002). Curly maple, caretto and many woods from around the world. 25″ diameter. “A five-revolution Möbius style torus,” Malcolm says. “‘Unity’ celebrates the number five. A crosscut of the torus reveals a pentagram (five pointed star). If you were to trace any valley between any two ridges (or trace a ridge), you would make five revolutions before returning to your starting point. Does this make it a Möbius (one edge and one side)? The overall diameter is close to five squared (25″). In ancient times, the pentagram (derived from the pentagon) was a symbol for health and salvation, and in the Middle Ages, it was used as a symbol to repulse evil spirits. As a geometric form, the pentagram is quite significant; the bisected line lengths contain the golden ratio, the number known as phi, approximately 1.618. The number five has always been regarded as mystical and magical, and it relates to the human form. We have five fingers/toes on each limb. We commonly possess five senses – sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste – the list goes on and on. It has been said that, ‘All things happen in fives or are divisible by or are multiples of fives.’ This was a complex and challenging project, but there was relatively very little turning; however, every one of the 100 individual pentagram-shaped rings spent time on the lathe in order to create the matching concave curves. After assembly, the surface contained ridges between every small ring, which required extensive abrasive smoothing, but the final shape depended upon the pre-turning of the components.”
One of the people who had the greatest impact on Malcolm was his grandfather, Rap Gardner. At an early age, Granddad would give him guidance on how to make items with wood. He still remembers making a birdhouse before he started grammar school. From those early days Malcolm always had an interest in woodworking. It wasn’t until after he got married that woodworking became a necessary hobby. In 1976, after scraping together enough money with his wife, Tere, to buy their first home, there was nothing left for furniture. He purchased a Craftsman table saw and converted a bedroom into a shop (there was no garage) and proceeded to make their furniture, some of which is in use today.
In 1993, Malcolm had a shop full of tools and a house full of furniture, so his desire to stay active in the shop turned to woodturning. For the first year, Malcolm turned in isolation. He knew nothing about woodturning clubs, the American Association of Woodturners (AAW) or the fact that there were schools scattered throughout America that offered workshops on turning methods. Turning bowls was a great place to start, with instant gratification, but after turning a few dozen bowls, he found life at the lathe became boring. He started gluing in a few pieces of wood to add some character and color, not really knowing that he was creating “segmented” turnings.
CROOKED JOURNEY (2015). Peruvian walnut and white-dyed veneer, 8,800 individual pieces. About 14″ dia. “This is a very difficult shape to explain,” Malcolm says. “It’s an endless tubular ribbon. It’s constructed from 10 half-sections of five-sided donut shapes (five full donuts were used). To successfully complete the loop, three different donut diameters were created, with different orientations of the pentagon surfaces. The pentagon cross-sections severely limited directional changes. Each directional change occurs at the vertex of an imaginary decagon (10-sided polygon). The relationship between the five-sided donuts and the points of a 10-sided shape is what made the assembly possible. It was a bit of a head-scratcher to design. Finished with MinWax Wipe-On Poly.”
In 1994, Malcolm discovered there was to be an AAW woodturning symposium in Fort Collins, Col. Because he had the time and the resources he decided to attend and took along a few of his pieces to display in the open gallery. He was so new to turning that he had no idea who any of the presenters were but ended up in a workshop on deep vessel hollow forms taught by Clay Foster. This was his first exposure to professional turning – the first time that he witnessed another person turn wood. By the end of the weekend he befriended a gentleman by the name of Ray Allen, one of the world’s best-known segmenters. Ray was an inspiration to Malcolm and his first real turning mentor. Ray’s work as a segmented turner elevated the craft to an acceptable form of art turning, and it boosted segmented turnings to the collector level. Prior to Ray, segmented turning didn’t have a great reputation due to so many gluing failures and improper construction methods. However, Malcolm saw segmented turning as a truly unique art form that was in its infancy. He was hooked.
TOLERANCE (2005). Myrtlewood. About 32″ tall. “A complex ribbon form constructed with half-cylinders and half-bowls,” Malcolm says. “The designs, which are pierced through the wood wall and not painted, are symbols used by many cultures throughout history and the endless knot has its own meaning.”
Malcolm then discovered an AAW turning chapter in Sacramento and religiously made the two-hour trip to meetings every month for years. He became driven to learn all he could about turning while creating and developing new processes in his segmented works. By 1997, he became a regular instructor at the annual AAW symposium and eventually became a board member and even the vice president. Although he didn’t become a full-time professional turner until after he retired from the ski industry in 2002, his work was represented at a gallery in San Francisco called the Stones Gallery. Within eight short years Malcolm had gone from a turning beginner to a turner extraordinaire.
During the last three decades Malcolm has developed many innovations such as the porthole feature ring, ribbon construction, dizzy bowls, checkered hollow forms, tubular construction and orderly tangles. His work ranges from tiny jewelry items to outdoor sculptural pieces that require a crane for installation. He, along with Bill Smith and Curt Theobald, are the founding fathers of the Segmented Woodturners, an AAW chapter with hundreds of members around the world that host a biennial symposium. He has written three books, self-produced countless educational videos and has a big following on YouTube.
A TANGLED WEB (2014). 22″ dia. Inspired by the Sir Walter Scott quote, “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” “Composed of 12 five-pointed star shapes (pentagons with concave curved sides), arranged in an ‘orderly tangle,’” Malcolm says. “Won the Craftsmanship award at the 2015 Bridges Conference.”
However, his greatest contribution to the world of polychromatic turning is much more than inventing new ways to glue together pieces of wood. Malcolm is responsible for crossing the line between fine woodworking and fine turning. Through intuition, remarkable engineering and clever designs he has transformed the process of cutting, gluing and assembling wood in contorted ways. Then, with the skills of a virtuoso turner, he has proven that the two crafts, woodworking and woodturning, can collide and live in harmony.
Editor’s Note: Longtime LAP author Don Williams is in the process of writing a new book: “The Period Finisher’s Manual.” The book will be a culmination of his years working as a conservator, educator and scholar (including more than 25 years of service to the Smithsonian) with expertise in conservation, woodworking and wood finishing. Here he talks about his writing process. You can find Don online at donsbarn.com.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
For most of my working life, writing tasks were simply a matter of plugging information clusters into whatever format the recipient required. Artifact condition reports, conservation proposals and conservation treatment reports follow a regular format. Either you had the information at hand or your did not. Ditto budget requests, performance evaluations, monthly and annual reports, and a multitude of bureaucratic tickets to be punched.
Much to my surprise I discovered that I did not mind the writing itself and began to explore it outside the 9-to-5 boundaries. I did not care if I was any good at it, rather I found it to be a pleasant diversion. I recall the day in the 1990s when I was reading a well-known thriller from the library. After several dozen pages I put it down and said to myself, “Self, you can do better than this.” So, over the next year I wrote a novel about a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong woman and the bad, bad things that ensue; a story that tied together threads from the Weather Underground, Stasi terror brokers, mobsters, purloined identity, and a history teacher at a remote private school (and, of course, a beautiful sniper).
I have no idea if it is any good but there is a beginning, a middle with many rabbit trails, and an end. From the start, I knew where the story was going, but I did not always know how it was going to get there. I did not write it in a beginning-to-end manner. Since the bare bones of the story required a lot of embellishment I found that the enriching texture was added when Whimsy would strike and individual vignettes unfolded irrespective of where they fit in the plot. When the pile was large enough I knitted all the pieces together, smoothing out their connections. I found in subsequent fiction writing that this strategy fits my temperament perfectly. (My current book plot involves weaving together 1760s Parisian ateliers, a 1930s Skull-and-Bones-ish group, the French Underground, the contemporary New York museum scene, and a furniture conservator putting his life back together after a 10-year bender and how he saves Western Civilization while the bodies start piling up.)
In the former cases the text was established by Roubo himself via Michele Pietryka-Pagán and all I had to do was make it sensible to a 21st-century woodworker. There were times I thought the latter text (“Virtuoso”) wrote itself because Studley’s tool cabinet was so iconic all I had to do was write what I saw, gather as much primary source material as possible (thank you, John Cashman!), get it all down on paper and smooth out any wrinkles (aka “editing”). As I recall, the first draft of “Virtuoso” took about 10 weeks, eight hours a day most days, or about 100 words per hour. The captions took another two weeks, at a faster pace. But that was at the end of several years of traveling, observing, measuring and researching, so the raw material was ready at the waiting.
My current labor on “The Period Finisher’s Manual” began years ago with a detailed outline, so for good or ill it will have a fairly cogent organization. I hope. When the time comes, Chris will tell me if I am correct and instruct me on changes if I am not.
My typical working habit is proving to be true for “The Period Finisher’s Manual.” With my working outline in hand, and mental sketches of the knowledge to be conveyed, I wait for the paragraph (or paragraphs) to emerge from my experience of almost five decades of practicing and exploring wood finishing. “The Period Finisher’s Manual” content thus congeals in a non-linear fashion but in the end congeal it does, and the gelatinous masses are merged in a careful review and self-edit. Sometimes smoothing these wrinkles is more work than creating the original fabric.
One minute I might be working on a section describing the nature of solvents and a half hour later something about good finishing shop rags or making 18th-century sandpaper followed by using molten wax grain filler or building a flawless spirit varnish then extolling the virtues of avoiding power tools near the finishing shop might come up. I do not labor over a section if it is not flowing well from my fingertips – that just means those words are still in gestation. I know that the words will emerge when their time comes. Once a larger section has all its swatches I sew them together, a sometimes-arduous task. I am reminded of Edison’s description of invention: “It is 1 percent inspiration and 99 perspiration.” That probably explains why the timeline for any book covers many years, a characterization that fits this book, too.
When writing a book like “The Period Finisher’s Manual,” my job is to first create the skeleton (outline) then fill in all the holes of the outline one at a time and do my best to make it accurate and readable. On Day One, all the holes were empty so I had a target-rich environment – any paragraphs I threw out there would fit something, somewhere. As I told someone recently about this project, “You start with one paragraph somewhere in the book. Anywhere. It does not matter. You keep writing until you have a 1,000 or 1,500 paragraphs. You connect them together seamlessly. Then you have a book.”