Search Results for: a kind of order

After a long hiatus from shop time thanks to Indiana’s stay-at-home directive, I’ve been back in full force over the past two weeks. Sure, I could have kept working on the kitchen — my shop is next to our house. But why turn my work area into a life-size game of Tetris with cabinets as playing pieces a moment before that crowding was really necessary? Better to leave the roughsawn oak and sheets of plywood flat until we could firm up the schedule for delivery and installation.

Every kitchen I’ve worked on has entailed a few changes along the way. I do my best to help clients make the most important decisions early on. I also encourage them not just to order their plumbing fixtures and appliances, but to have them on hand before I start to cut materials, because reworking cabinets can get expensive quickly.

On this job we’ve done a lot of things differently because of the ongoing pandemic. With no clear idea how long the stay-at-home directive was going to last, my clients, Jenny and Ben, were in less of a hurry to order appliances, etc. and have them delivered — they’ve been working full-time from home in the company of their three children, whose schools were closed for in-person classes. Ordinarily we would have met to discuss a few questions that have cropped up; instead, we’ve hammered things out by email and phone. I’ve dropped off samples of milk paint at their back door. Everything has been slightly off — at times, surreal.

Our only recent meeting in person took place at a local stone yard, where Jenny and Ben fell in love with a slab of medium-gray soapstone. Compared to other stone, such as granite, this one is relatively soft, so I wanted them to be aware of how it would likely age. I sent snapshots from our kitchen, which has pale gray soapstone counters, and emphasized that even though we treat our counters with care, there’s significant wear along the front edge at the sink. This stone would require extra coddling.

They weighed my warnings. Then, intoxicated by the beauty of the stone, they concluded they had to have it.

To compensate, they decided to use a different kind of sink. The plans included an undermount sink, but after seeing pictures of our counter, Ben and Jenny decided to buy an enameled cast iron apron front, to do away with the especially vulnerable strip of stone across the front. Good thing I hadn’t started building the cabinets — not only did this change the doors from full height to more like 20″; it also meant the sink base would have to be 2″ longer.

The second major change has been to the kitchen’s inside corner. In our earliest discussions I’d gone through my usual reasons for recommending a simple stack of drawers instead of attempting to use the blind space that would otherwise be wasted, but Ben and Jenny decided to go with a corner optimizer.

Full disclosure: I had never installed one of these units, which I first learned of thanks to Craig Regan. It seemed like a better choice than the half-moon blind corner pull-out I once experimented with in my own kitchen (more about this in my forthcoming book); it’s sturdy, better looking and smooth in operation. But once I had it in the cabinet I could see trouble down the line: Unless you’re meticulous about pulling the unit straight out and extending it fully before you pull the second half forward, the face frame of the corner cabinet and the face of the cabinet next to it would get scratched and banged up in short order. For a family of five who really use their kitchen, it seemed like a bad idea.

I thought through every likely scenario with the corner optimizer and decided to recommend we nix it in favor of some intelligently-designed, fully-functional drawers; depending on what we discover during demolition, the blind area in the corner will probably become a storage cabinet in the wall flanking the stairs to the basement.

To those who complain about old-timers being unwilling to change/jump on the bandwagon of The Newest And Greatest Thing, I offer this story as one reason why some of us whose livelihood depends on this kind of work prefer to recommend the products we know well. We’re not being lazy, fearful or unimaginative. We might have learned something over the decades from our mistakes. In the future, if clients ask me about the advisability of using a corner optimizer such as this one (and I am aware that this is not the only style available), I will factor what I know about how they use their kitchen into my response, as I do with every other detail of kitchen design.

If anyone would like to buy this 15″ blind corner unit at a discount (it makes a great climbing frame/nap place/carnival ride for a cat), let me know in the comments.

–Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work

This post is a continuation from last week’s post, a “read-along” or book club of sorts. This week, I’ll be discussing the first section of “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” by James Krenov, up to page 23. Next week, we’ll be reading on from here up to page 51, and you can leave comments and questions about pages 23-51 in the comments section at the bottom of this post, which I’ll answer and incorporate into next week’s post.

Immediately upon opening, it’s clear that James Krenov’s first book, “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” is not really a “how-to” in any sense. There’s no table of contents. The first writing past the acknowledgements is a poem by Chuang Tzu, a Taoist poet who wrote in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. The paragraphs are long and read like the spoken word. If you have the first edition, there’s an Old Testament quote on the copyright page, Sirach (or Ecclesiastes) 38:34.

Atypical though it was, this book was a huge success. Nancy Newman Green, Krenov’s editor at Van Nostrand Reinhold (with whom I had the pleasure of talking with recently), remembers that they had a saying around VNR about Krenov:

“If you hung up a sign in the middle of the woods that said ‘James Krenov will be here to speak at 3 o’clock,’ a few thousand people would be there to hear him talk.” 

But I’m getting off track – suffice to say, the book was popular, and what made it popular were the words and philosophy Krenov detailed. So let’s get back to the text. The rest of all of this, the history, the lead-up, the legacy – for that, you can read my biography when it comes out.

One of the first things that strikes me about Jim’s writing is just how informal and stream-of-consciousness it is – in fact, you can practically hear Jim reading it out loud. If you haven’t heard Jim speak before, you’re missing out – say what you want about his philosophy, aesthetics or attitude, he was a remarkable lecturer, and he had a gift for elocution.

This book is, in fact, a collection of transcribed essays or lectures – in 1970, Einar and Kasja Telander (Einar is the silversmith for whom Jim built the veroola kitchen cabinet in 1976, which was photographed for “Worker in Wood”) gave him a voice recorder for his 50th birthday, and he took to it immediately, using it both for correspondence and for the dictation of his essays and books. He worked with both the tape recorder and his written notes at the workbench to write his books, bouncing between them to compose the writing.

The tapes for “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” were transcribed by Rochester Institute of Technology, as a favor to Jim – Craig McArt, the man responsible for recommending him as a teacher at RIT and the person who most encouraged him in the writing this first book, was by 1973 the chair of the Department of Industrial and Environmental Design at RIT. McArt had visited Jim in Stockholm back in 1966 and had carried back with him an essay written by Jim called “Wood: The Friendly Mystery,” which was published by Craft Horizons in 1967 (here’s a copy on the Craft Council’s archive website). If you’re interested, give that article a read and keep it in mind before you do next week’s reading.

So, once we know that the book was dictated, it puts the book in a different context – it might better be looked at as a series of lectures. Knowing that, let’s look more at the first passage, really just nine short pages, and pull a few important moments out.

The first half of the passage is, in effect, an ode to wood as a material. In the opening paragraph, ironically beginning with “It’s always a little difficult for me to begin talking about wood” right before he goes into a very eloquent missive about wood, he relates that he feels that wood, in his own way of thinking, really is alive. Krenov’s daughter remembers her father as being an animist of sorts, ascribing some kind of soul or inner life to the objects and plants around him – Krenov hints at the root of these beliefs in this essay, his childhood “in the North,” and in that context, the serious sensitivity and love he shows for wood as a medium only makes more sense.

The other thing that quickly becomes clear in the book is that it is not instructional – many of Jim’s visiting students, whom he hosted in his home workshop throughout the 1960s and 1970s, remember his advice as always being a bit vague, a trait that carries right through into his lectures from the 1990s and 2000s. Phrases such as “It is still possible to find a few good sources of wood” would, at time, frustrate his visiting students, but here in the book, they serve as anecdotes and a sort of fable about his life as a craftsperson, with their own morals and conclusions presented to the reader. He doesn’t give you a shopping list for the home center, but more of an idea of what has worked for him, and what could work for you, if you happen upon it or go in search of it.

There is a moment of Jim’s past that flashes across the page at one point. On page 13, Jim writes that “Expression in wood, if I may say so, is a bit heavy handed there [in the United States]; oversimplified. So often the emphasis in on form – as in sculpture.” This passage is certainly a reflection on Jim’s dissonant time in his first stint at RIT alongside Wendell Castle – they did not get along, and Jim would, for a number of years, relay his disappointment in the pursuit of furniture as sculpture and the indifference to wood as a medium he found in many of his colleague’s work. “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” largely stays out of the weeds of criticism, though, certainly in relation to the essay’s Jim wrote in Swedish magazines at the same time – articles with titles like “Is craftsmanship boring?” or “Do we care about wood art?” make it clear that Krenov was not always optimistic about the attitudes around him. When the language between the two different platforms is compared, it’s clear that this book is not aimed at the Swedish craft scene, or his colleagues and contemporaries (with whom he often had a strained relationship) – it’s aimed at a new generation, students or curious onlookers, and Jim often speaks using “we” rather than “I.”

Here’s a last selection to look at, before I get into a few questions and comments people posted from their own reading. I’m just going to pull a big quote, because it’s as close to a synoptic manifesto as you’ll get from Krenov.

“I think that what I would like to do before it is too late is to get this across to a few craftsmen-to-be who will work after me, and also to a public which will be there to receive them, because we are living in a time when, I believe, this is important. Fine things in wood are important, not only aesthetically, as oddities or rarities, but because we are becoming aware of the fact that much of our life is spent buying and discarding, and buying again, things that are not good. Some of us long to have at least something, somewhere, which will give us harmony and a sense of durability – I won’t say permanence, but durability– things that, through the years, become more and more beautiful, things we can leave our children. (page 15)

Krenov spent 11 years jumping between various educational institutions, and accepted at least three long-term teaching positions that he either quit within weeks of starting or was encouraged to leave after interpersonal difficulties arose with administrators or colleagues, often caused by his irascible and uncompromising attitude toward craft. This passage is his call for those students, a next generation of craftspeople that might be more sympathetic to his holistic and idealistic way of working, one that he hadn’t found academia or art schools to be sympathetic to. He also makes a form of plea to the public to change or be more aware of their attitudes to fine work (the main subject of his writing in Swedish magazines, though there he chose a decidedly less optimistic or charitable way of expressing it).

When he wrote this book, he wouldn’t have known it, but it was exactly the right step to take in the direction of the establishment of his own school, which would happen just a few years later in 1981.

On to a few comments and questions from the comments section on my post from last week, where I prompted you all to ask or comment away about this first passage. I responded to many comments directly, but there were a few I wanted to share and elaborate on in this post, in keeping with the idea that this might be more of a discussion or back-and-forth between you and me while we read through the book.

Ryan Stadt asked about the Chuang Tzu passage at the beginning of the book, translated by Thomas Merton. If you’ve got a minute, Merton is an amazing character to look into – he was a Christian mystic, and Ryan wondered if there was any deeper connection there.

In fact, I think the first time Jim encountered this quote was in Form magazine, the Swedish design magazine Jim wrote for a number of times in the 1960s and 1970s. The passage appears as interstitial material between a preceding article and Jim’s essay for Form in 1973, but it doesn’t appear to have been at Jim’s request nor is it relevant to the subject of his article. The text is shrunk and oddly formatted and, to my eye (I was a managing editor for, like, six months!), it looks like it was included to make the line and page breaks neat and without white space. But, obviously the poem is well-suited to Jim’s sensitivities – perhaps it was a moment of poetic chance, or was included at his direction? It’s a detail I can’t confirm, and so it doesn’t go in the book, but if it did occur that way then it’s a lovely moment of happenstance. Perhaps even mystical?

Larry Barrett, a good friend who taught me to make greenwood chairs a few years back, wondered what Jim might’ve thought about greenwoodworking, especially the appreciation of materials and the similar thrills of splitting open a log and sawing it open. In fact, Jim Krenov and John Alexander did meet at one point in California – the story isn’t much, but I know that Jim was aware of greenwoodworking as a method and of Alexander’s work. Krenov certainly split open his fair share of wood, being an avid hiker and self-sufficient backpacker in the north of Sweden, and he did often split up slabs that were too wide to fit in the basement or had already begun splitting at their pith. But, perhaps his interest in woods from abroad and the backyard left him more likely to stick with the sawn stuff – though, he did use an Alaskan chainsaw mill quite a bit, and we were still learning to use them at his school when I was there.

Larry also pointed out that the Welsh concept of the “square mile” that Chris Williams wrote about in his new book fits neatly with the mention of Wharton Esherick’s idea that one could work with only the wood in your own backyard. Krenov was quite aware of John Brown – in Krenov’s papers and effects there are a few articles written by John Brown that Jim had saved, with highlighted notes in the margins. There are also definite connections to Slöjd in Wood (Wille Sundqvist, Jogge’s father, also went to Carl Malmsten’s school, and Jim’s reverence for carved pulls and knife-work has some of its roots in his exposure to Swedish crafts). Really, a sensitivity to wood as a material is a common thread through much of the craft, and when you start reading the more philosophic threads of Jim’s writing, it does echo through a number of methods and traditions that were not his. It makes sense that wood and woodworking are intertwined, no matter how many people try to melt clown wigs and pour them into the space between two live-edge slabs – but, did you know, Greg Klassen, who popularized the “river” tables (and made them in a much more interesting and durable way than the epoxy knock-offs that followed, in my opinion), was a student at Krenov’s school?

I really enjoyed the comments and questions that you all sent along for this reading – so, please do it again! Next week, I’ll be writing about the next few passages, up to page 51 of the book, and if you want to join in and read along, please do, and use the comments section below to ask any questions, highlight a passage or make a comment on the next section of the book. Also, I’d encourage you to read the two-page article “Wood: the Friendly Mystery” as well – here’s a copy from the Craft Council’s archive. You’ll understand why once you do the reading!

— Brendan Gaffney

“Students are forever running to libraries to get various books – on peasant art, Scandinavian modern, Shaker, Colonial, Indian – one this and one that. They fill their heads with all these images, and then frantically try to come up with something of their own. As though you put these ingredients in a kettle, add water, stir, and cook for two hours. What do you get? Pottage. Pea soup.

It’s a losing battle. And so exhausting. Stay out of it. It took me a long time to realize this, and accept my unoriginal self. Try to find the sort of people for whom there is another originality – that of the quiet object in unquiet times.”

James Krenov, “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” p.45

It’s been nearly two years since we first announced my biography of James Krenov, and more than that since I began my research. I had initially hoped to keep a regular blogging practice up through the book’s writing – it turned out that I had a lot to learn. Nearly every week since that time two years ago, I’ve learned some new facet of Krenov’s life, some new angle to his approach, a new anecdote or, in some cases, entire paths and works of his that I (and the internet, his family or his close friends) had never known about. The number of revelations I had, even about Krenov’s basic biographical details or work, made me wary of putting anything down in writing that I wasn’t ready to share – you don’t know what you don’t know.

Now, with my manuscript about 80 percent done, and nearly every stone upturned, I’ve emerged with an entirely different and more total image of Krenov, as an individual, a philosopher and a craftsperson. This past week I hit a milestone in my writing – I finished my chapter writing about Jim’s first woodworking book, “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” which was a huge moment of inflection in his career. Luckily for me and my writing, the book garnered him enough attention and publicity that I’ve officially entered a phase of his life where documentation and detail is no longer hard-won – writing the last half-dozen chapters of his life is more about noise reduction and separating the wheat from the chaff.

Krenov was already 56 years old when “Notebook” was published (though he started writing it a decade earlier). He shared little of his own biographic details – like so much of Krenov’s advice to students, his anecdotes and stories are presented almost as fables, or points along a story arc or in service of a conclusion, not a self-examination or real background. He writes a detailed autobiographic summary at the back of “Notebook,” but he omits so much (I now know!). He never discussed (in any length) his context, that of the students, colleagues, competitors and critics he came up around in Stockholm for 15 years. Perhaps a nod to Carl Malmsten, a few vague acknowledgements in the front matter of the book. But he had been a translator, boatbuilder, travel writer, factory worker, so much more in his youth, and as a craftsperson he interacted with a wide swath of trends and tastemakers, old and new – and he discussed very little of this publicly, though it was deeply formative in his own trajectory.

There is a context to Krenov’s writing –  one that goes much deeper than the already nuanced and sensitive philosophy he expressed in his books. I just read through “Notebook” again over the past week, and with all that I know now, after interviewing people around the globe and sifting through thousands of pages of photos, letters, newspaper archives and public documents, the book’s subtleties and Krenov’s implicit understandings and influences are much richer. My own reflections, conclusions and musings I take away from reading the book are much deeper and more rewarding as well.

And a biography is not the place to write a detailed analysis of the book – that could easily be its own tome, as nearly each paragraph’s individual implications are worth a dissection (to my eye). And he went on to write four more books on the subject. I hope that many who might be interested in this biography might have read his books already – but should I count on that? And, while I think my biography will offer up the fruits of my discoveries for my readers, would they have come to similar conclusions and interpretations?

So, with so many of us in our homes, I thought I’d propose an idea, one I’ve discussed with a few fellow graduates of Jim’s school in recent weeks – a kind of book club, where we can discuss his books and work and I can share this rich new understanding and insight I have into Krenov’s writings and life.

So – a week from today, I’ll be writing my own impressions and analysis of the first section of Krenov’s first book, “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” and pulling quotes or passages that I find relevant, interesting or though-provoking. Specifically, I’ll be looking at the front matter of the book (the acknowledgements, openings quotes and first essay) up to page 23.

I’d also like to include you all in this, in discussion and in my write-up next week – so, over the course of this next week, give the book a read up to page 23, make some notes or come up with a question or two you might have about the work, photography or philosophy, and post them in the comments of this post, down below. I’ll be tending to the comments over the next week, to react to or answer simpler questions, but the more complex impressions, perspectives or questions will make up a section of my own post next week. I hope you all will also interact with each other in the comments, too. If enough people are interested, I’ll look into hosting an online chatroom or live discussion, where we might have an easier time going back and forth in a more focused or direct manner.

If you don’t have a copy of the book, you can certainly order one to join in the discussion (it’s worth having a copy around, and the book is still available to order online), but the Internet Archive has also set up a digital library online during this pandemic to get people access to reading material while their libraries are closed. The first edition of Krenov’s book is hosted there, and you can “borrow” the book just as you would from a library (though you will have to make an account to do so): here’s the link. That’s the first edition version of the book, from Van Nostrad Reinhold, which is what I’ll be reading – the language and photos didn’t change in subsequent publications, but there were introductions and forewords in future editions that we won’t be discussing here.

It’s less than an hour’s read, and I’ll continue to work through the rest of the book in the upcoming weeks, provided there is an interest. There’s a good reason this book was so influential at the time – and I think many of the quotes, like the one I opened this post with, remain relevant and worth discussing in any creative practice or craft. Every time I read back through it, I find more to think about – and I suspect you will, too. I hope my insights into the book will also demonstrate that the work of this biography is much more than a service to Jim’s legacy – I think an understanding of Krenov’s life and its contextual environments informs a deeper understanding of craft and creative practice through the 20th century. It also provides a lot of material from which you might glean a better understanding of your own position and practice as a craftsperson or consumer.

— Brendan Gaffney