Many of you have been asking about some of our newer titles, with specific questions about content and wondering if these books are right for you. So we have assembled pdf excerpts for each of these books, which you are welcome to download.
The pdf for “Ingenious Mechanicks” by Christopher Schwarz includes the table of contents, introduction and Chapter 1: Why Early Workbenches?.
The pdf for “Slöjd in Wood” by Jögge Sundqvist includes the table of contents, a six-page description of what slöjd means, “the kitchen as a workshop,” the benefits of working in slöjd, and a chapter that shows you how to make knobs and latches.
The pdf for “Cut & Dried” by Richard Jones includes a detailed table of contents (three pages, singled-spaced), foreword, acknowledgements, a guide to the abbreviations used in the book and Chapter 7: Coping with Wood Movement (25 pages on dimensional change, distortion, moisture cycling and stress release (kickback)).
The pdf for “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown includes a poem, introduction, author’s foreword (there are two) and his chapter on Bending Wood for Chair Parts.
You can find more details and ordering information for each of these books here.
No trespassing. I like to go places that haven’t been interpreted by museum personnel or academics (nothing against these people, but I like to draw my own conclusions). This unrestored coastal artillery facility is nothing like the touristy one down the road.
Sometimes I wonder why I research old workbenches, build them and write about them. I know my critics and friends wonder the same thing.
The truth is, I have a gland – well, it feels like a gland – deep inside my torso. It’s located a bit above my tailbone and in front of the base of my spine. Ever since I was a boy, that area would tingle and throb when I ventured into places I wasn’t allowed.
(My critics would say the location of that gland – or whatever it is – is also where a lot of crap is produced in the human body.)
I was 6 or 7 the first time I felt it. My family attended First Presbyterian Church in Fort Smith, Ark., which is downtown and surrounded by empty buildings from the town’s 19th-century heyday. Next to the church was the derelict Goldman Hotel, a landmark six-story building built in 1910 that was the center of the town’s social scene until World War II.
The building was shut to the public at about the time my family moved to Fort Smith in 1973 (and demolished in the 1990s). But I spent every Sunday and Wednesday in its shadow and soon began sneaking out of Sunday school to explore the hotel through an opening on the building’s west side.
Though the Goldman was dilapidated – it had been an apartment building in its last days – there were remnants of its glory and its rich ornamentation throughout. Furniture. Light fixtures. Tiles. Mouldings.
That was the first time I ever felt that odd tingle. It was better than any high I have achieved with alcohol (or the banana peels I smoked in college). And I have chased after that feeling my entire life.
I have a thing for old and abandoned places. I love to explore overgrown concrete battlements that line harbors and rivers. Abandoned houses – we had a creepy overgrown one on our farm – are like a sip of bourbon. Multi-level factories filled with garbage, graffiti and old equipment are like a multi-day bender.
I knew I was wrong in the head (or the gland) in 2012 when I became halfcrazed about buying an old brewery in Covington, Ky. It had two flooded subbasements and a network of unexplored lagering tunnels that staggered off below the old city.
During a tour of that building, I encountered a deep pit in its basement. I threw a rock down the hole and didn’t hear it splash or hit bottom.
“Where does it go?” I asked the real estate agent.
Her reply: “We have no idea.”
I thought: “I have a flashlight and rope in my truck.” Behind me, I heard my wife, Lucy, call out: “Nope! We are done here!”
It probably was the right decision.
At other times, the gland acts up when I’m not in physical danger, but when I’m on the precipice of obsession. One week I flew to New York City and visited Joel Moskowitz of Tools for Working Wood. The highlight of that trip was paging through his 20th-century reprint of A.J. Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier.” Like most woodworkers, I had seen the workbench illustrated in Plate 11 of Roubo’s multi-volume book many times before. But I hadn’t seen Roubo’s whole work – nearly 400 pages of plates. And many of the plates showed this simple bench in use for all manner of operations, from installing moulding in an apartment to sandshading veneer for marquetry.
While sitting on Joel’s couch with this giant tome on my lap, I became as intoxicated as the day I first ducked into a broken window at the Goldman Hotel. The feeling was so powerful that it verged on physical pain.
When I returned to Cincinnati, I felt physically compelled to build that workbench. I ripped up the editorial calendar for the 2005 issue of Woodworking Magazine and presented a new plan to the magazine’s staff to satisfy my personal lust: Build the 18th-century Roubo workbench using yellow pine (to make it less expensive).
I offered to do all the work – building, writing and illustrating – so no one objected. Or perhaps they were wary of crossing me because I looked a bit crazed. I had drafted my plan the night before and hadn’t slept much.
Building that first Roubo workbench and putting it to work was like mainlining the unknown for me – like exploring a forgotten Soviet missile silo or finding a passage to catacombs beneath my house.
Building that Roubo bench led to making the Holtzapffel workbench – a German/English hybrid. Then a Nicholson bench – the classic English workbench – and about a dozen variants of benches from Europe, the U.K. and North America.
It has been a 13-year obsession with no end in sight.
Cover of “Woodworker Annual,” The Woodworker Volume 63, Being the Twelve Monthly Copies, January-December, 1959
“We are all apt to cling to youth as if it were the whole of life, the remainder an uncomfortable margin that does not really count. The obvious attractiveness of youth, its bounding health and vigour, its enthusiasms and ambitions, conspire to hide from our eyes the pleasures and discoveries that can come with maturity.
‘Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
The last of life, for which the first was made’
“wrote Browning in ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra,’ that beautiful poem in which he unfolds the whole panorama of life and experience. It is an inspiring panorama if we accept it in its wholeness, not youth only, that time of raw beginnings, but those later years in which we garner the fruits. Little by little the really experiencing man learns to know more about himself and his potentialities. So often the beginning of wisdom comes when we discover for ourselves some simple truth that we have taken for granted since childhood, and the discovery within ourselves of unguessed powers when we learn to harness and discipline the character. The young man who could never bring a job of woodwork to a successful conclusion because he was far too impatient may learn patience in the school of life, so that when later he turns back to woodwork there will no longer be that human failing between himself and the job, and the young man who could never finish without scamping become in his maturity an excellent craftsman.
“To see life opening out before us as something rich in possibilities, of developing interests, is to feel a quickening of the spirit, a sense of purpose that will carry us a long way. What we have to forget are the shallow judgments, our own and other people’s, which may have coloured and restricted our youth. If we cling on to them still, then our whole lives may remain enclosed in a narrow groove. We have to be adventurers and explorers, having the initiative and courage to find out our own capabilities, not only in the things that have come easily to use, but in the more difficult things as well. Limits we must have, but we shall now, if we are wise, yield to these too tightly. ‘You never know till you try’ is one of the old adages that no one can safely ignore. Sometimes it takes us to the fullness of maturity and beyond to find out how true it is, and we may be sure that a contented old age will go to the triers. They will see, looking back, that life has been but an apprenticeship and will glimpse a greater purpose behind, and what appeared to them once as the end of it all be but a greater beginning.”
This morning about 4 a.m. I sat bolt upright in bed when the bells at the Niederaltaich Abbey began making an end-of-the-world clanging. Instead of cursing, however, I laid back and felt a small measure of solidarity with the noisemakers.
One of the things I love about teaching (or assisting a teacher) is listening to the students discuss how they accumulate woodworking knowledge. During the last few years of careful listening, I can see how I – as a communicator – am becoming obsolete.
This is not a complaint. I welcome my obsolescence and am happy to stare at it in the face over a beer.
For now, the world belongs to the YouTube woodworker. Advertisers – even car companies – are pouring money into the sector. More important, my students’ conversations revolve around the personalities, projects and exploits of the YouTubers.
This is not a complaint. Maintaining a YouTube channel is damn hard work. Finding an audience has always been the key to surviving in the media profession. And I’ve never chased advertising dollars.
Video is not for me. For me, the best way to learn woodworking is through print and in person. Video bores me to tears. (Yes, I’ve done it. I hated it. I did it to please people I like – not myself.) My brain sees video as inefficient. “Skipping to the good parts” never works. So I have concluded that I have a fundamental disconnect. I would rather read a book, draw on a sheet of paper or go to the dentist than watch someone on my phone build something.
It might have something to do with the way I view sports. I love to play. I hate to watch.
All this is to say that I can feel myself hunkering down for a long winter. Print is – for the most part – in decline. I refuse to give up on it. In fact, I have structured my life so that even if print is flushed down the toilet, processed at a waste treatment plant and then squirted out at some sausage plant in New Jersey, you can’t put me out of business.
My plan is to make woodworking books until I die. Our audience might defect to the short-shorts and man-bun dancing monkeys, but I’ve decided to let the people in 50 or 60 years decide if John and I are doing the right thing.
After you’re worm food and cannot rise to your own defense, that’s the true test.
This idea saturates me here at Niederaltaich Abbey, where I’m teaching woodworking for the next seven days. For the most part, the world has left the monks here behind. And they live a life that is entrenched in an older way.
Brown robes are not my thing (my color analyst says I’m a winter), but yeah, I feel it. Especially at 4 a.m.
