After a long dry spell – the last book we sent to press was in December – we now have four books on press. (Actually, we have five books if you count the somewhat-cursed edition of Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises” that has been on press for six months. More on that below.)
Today we finished our work on two books and won’t see them again until a semi backs up to the warehouse in 11 weeks. You can sign up to be notified when any of these books arrive in the warehouse on this page.
“The Belligerent Finisher” by John Porritt. This is our first book devoted to finishing, and it is a doozie. Porritt, a furniture restorer and chairmaker, shows many of the tricks he uses to add subtle (and beautiful) wear and age to a new piece. Porritt is not attempting to show you how to make fakes. He is trying to show you something deeper – how to add color and texture to a piece so its form matches its finish. Most of his processes use simple and common tools (a chainmail pot scrubber, a deer antler, a handheld propane torch, washing powder). The book walks you through all the steps for two backstools. Then there’s a gallery that shows how you can mix and match these techniques on other pieces. The book should arrive in our warehouse in September.
“Sharpen This” by Christopher Schwarz. I think of this book as a piece of historical fiction. What if someone wrote a book about how to sharpen, and that person wasn’t making sharpening equipment. And the internet didn’t exist. This is a pocket-book-sized treatise that boils down everything I know about sharpening media, steel and technique to give the reader a clear understanding of sharpening. The book embraces all the sharpening systems. But it focuses on how to work with a minimum amount of expensive gear. And how to work fast. This is a book I never wanted to write. But after teaching so many beginners who were so horribly confused, I decided to just lay it all out there. The book should arrive in our warehouse in September.
“Euclid’s Door” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. Geometry lovers rejoice. Jim and George are back with a new book about how to make your own insanely accurate woodworking layout tools using simple hand tools and geometry that blew our minds. Honestly, both Megan and I had to step into the shop to confirm some of the geometric constructions really worked (they do). If you have been resisting geometry and whole-number ratios, this book will show you how to apply it directly to tools that you will use for the rest of your life. Really good stuff – and the book is entirely hand-illustrated by Barb Walker and Keith Mitchell. The book should arrive in our warehouse in late August.
The Stick Chair Journal No. 1. A crazy experiment. Can we make a beautiful journal about vernacular chairs and have it be slightly more successful than our money-losing posters? The first issue has techniques you can use, a tool review, folklore about a cursed chair and complete plans for a new vernacular chair design, which you are free to build and sell if you like. When you buy the journal you will also receive a download of the full-size patterns for the chair. The Journal should arrive in our warehouse in late August.
You can sign up to be notified when these books arrive in our store. It’s a simple process, and it is 100 percent not marketing. We are not trying to trick you into signing up for ads or some worthless newsletter. It’s a notification service that costs a lot of money to use. But we encourage you to please use it to make your life easier.
Oh, and about that cursed edition of Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises.” That has been at the printer since December. Then the plant shut down because of COVID. Then it shut down because of ransomware. Then they printed one of the signatures with a missing page and had to redo the signature. The whole situation is almost laughable.
The plant told me they would ship those books on June 24. I’m not holding my breath.
The first of these two stools, (#59.537) is the stool that Alexander first studied in detail, leading the way into the lost craft of joinery. A table now at the Historical Society of Old Newbury (Massachusetts) is directly related to this stool in its construction and decoration. The table is believed to have been made by Stephen Jaques of Newbury, late in the 17th century. Thus the stool is attributed to him as well. It is clearly made of riven stock; the interior surfaces show evidence of riving and hewing, and in places retain their wedge-shaped cross-section. The pins securing the mortise-and-tenon joints are proud on the exterior and not trimmed on the inside at the apron height. These pins show their faceted shape on the inside. Layout lines struck with a marking gauge, fore-plane marks, hewing strokes and more are among the many traces of tool use Alexander found in abundance on this stool. This object literally paved the way for this book. Photo Courtesy of Winterthur Garden, Museum & Library
For more than two decades, this unlikely pair – an attorney in Baltimore and a joiner at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts – pieced together how this early furniture was constructed using a handful of written sources, the tool marks on surviving examples and endless experimentation in their workshops.
The result of their labor was “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree: An Introduction to 17th-century Joinery.” This book starts in the woodlot, wedging open a piece of green oak, and it ends in the shop with mixing your own paint using pigment and linseed oil. It’s an almost-breathtaking journey because it covers aspects of the craft that most modern woodworkers would never consider. And yet Alexander and Follansbee cover every detail of construction with such clarity that even beginning woodworkers will have the confidence to build a joint stool, an iconic piece of furniture from the 17th century.
In 17th-century New England, joiners made chairs, tables, chests, stools, cupboards, wall paneling and various other products all based on a few basic principles. Their oak was split, or “riven,” from a freshly felled log, and worked up at the bench with a few simple hand tools. Although the configuration of the pieces varied, the essence was always the same: a frame joined at its corners with drawbored mortise-and-tenon joints fastened with wooden pins. Sometimes these frames had panels fitted into their inner edges, as in a chest; other times they were open, as in the stool that is the subject of this book.
Our work in studying joined furniture has its roots in the post-and-rung chairs made by John (now Jennie) Alexander, whose 1978 book Make a Chair from a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood was pivotal in the revival of the traditional techniques regarding working wood riven or split from a log. This background became a key element in our study of 17th-century-style New England joinery.
The second Winterthur stool (#59.538) reinforces the things we learned from the first. In one sense, it is a better example than the Jaques stool, this one having even more of its original height. The aprons have two rows of moulding: a “crease” moulding, and one along the lower edge as well. The turnings are less detailed than those of the Jaques stool, but of a similar form. The two stools are both discussed and illustrated in Benno Forman’s American Seating Furniture 1630-1730 (Norton) pp. 180, 181. Photo Courtesy of Winterthur Garden, Museum & Library
Alexander’s experience from chairmaking was the necessary foundation that helped her recognize that the preparation of joinery stock was based upon the same green woodworking techniques as the chairs. In 1980, Charles Hummel of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library showed Alexander the interior of a joined oak chest in the collection. It was immediately clear that the rear stiles had been riven, not sawn, and that the stiles were bookmatched sections split from each other. This commenced a journey into the lost craft of joinery. With the patient kindness of Hummel, Benno M. Forman, Robert St. George, Robert Trent and many others, Alexander was able to closely study examples of 17th-century New England joined furniture.
Also in 1980, I saw an advertisement for a week-long class in chairmaking being held at Drew Langsner’s craft school Country Workshops taught by Alexander. I didn’t drive at the time, had practically never been out of New England and I wasn’t much of a woodworker. Plus, I was terminally shy. Regardless, I wrote to the address, signed up for the class and made plans to get to western North Carolina.
This little joined stool is a partial survivor from the 17th century. The turnings, the moulding profiles on the aprons and stretchers, and the chisel-chopped dentil decoration all indicate a strong relationship between this stool and numerous other furniture pieces from the entire 17th century in Plymouth Colony. The frame, although refinished long ago, is intact and original. The seat/top board is an early replacement, having been pictured in Wallace Nutting’s books in the 1920s in essentially the same condition. The stool originally had turned feet below the stretchers, so adding perhaps 3″ or 4″ more to its height. There is very little “rake” or splay to the side frames of this stool. Some of the rails on this stool are riven so slim that the tenons are “scant” in places. This means that the tenons are not necessarily full thickness throughout. This stool is the first place we noted the inner chamfer on the stiles. It occurs throughout almost all other Plymouth Colony joined chairs and tables as well. Photo Courtesy of the Museum of Fine arts, Boston
After stumbling along on my own for a few years, I returned to Country Workshops in the mid-1980s, and was for the next five years or more a regular attendee at classes – timber framing, white oak basketry, spoon carving, and coopering, as well as post-and-rung chairs with Alexander and American-style Windsor chairs. Sometime about 1986, Alexander showed a class at Country Workshops a slide presentation about 17th-century oak furniture made in New England.
Thus I was caught, and Alexander and I began an informal study together, yet we were 500 miles apart. Alexander lived and worked in Baltimore, Md., and I lived at the time in Hingham, Mass. Our “work” together consisted of lengthy correspondence and weekly phone calls. We would each spend some time studying original artifacts at Winterthur’s museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We’d take numerous slides and notes, compile these and send them off to each other in the mail. We would each work in our shops, experimenting with our ideas based on what we had seen on the surviving furniture. It was a cumbersome undertaking by today’s standards, but one benefit was that the need to write it down forced a sense of clarity upon our thinking. Each year we spent a week or two together, both in the workshop and at times studying artifacts.
This joined stool is worn, but intact; it has been repaired and re-pinned at some point. The one-board seat is cracked along its length and has been reinforced. Originally, it was pinned only into the stiles. Like the MFA stool, the joiner planed a chamfer on the inner corner of the stiles. The crease moulding used here is one of our favorites – a wide convex moulding flanked by two pointed fillets. We used it on several of our reproductions. It also is found on a large group of joined chests from Braintree, Mass., that we wrote about in American Furniture in 1996. In that article, we even linked the stool to the chests, based on the moulding, the stock preparation and joinery. These days, we’d be more cautious about making such an attribution. See Frances Gruber Safford’s American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art) for a detailed discussion of this stool. Photo Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Our artifact study was supplemented by the study of the tool history, as well as the documentary study of the period. To learn about the tool kit of the 17th century, we started with Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises: Or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Arts of Smithing, Joinery, Carpentry, Turning, Bricklaying. This book was published in serial form between 1678 and 1683 in London, and the chapters on joinery and turning were a critical first step in our study of tool history. (For more on the sources we used for tool research, see “The Historical Evidence for Tool Selection and Use” on page 25.)
Additionally, we studied probate inventories in great detail for craftsmen’s tools. Learning of the period tool kit and understanding the traditional use of bench tools such as planes, saws, chisels and carving tools helped us to see that to assemble a tool kit that functioned like a 17th-century kit was not that difficult. The forms and functions of hand tools have not changed much over time.
Throughout our studies, our friendship with Robert Trent, the leading American scholar on 17th-century furniture, was a great benefit. Trent led us through the process of researching the artifacts, their histories and the formation of an attribution for a group of furniture. This amounted to a private internship, though quite informal. The first results of this collaboration with Trent were published as “Seventeenth-Century Joinery from Braintree, Massachusetts: The Savell Shop Tradition” in the 1996 edition of the journal American Furniture. (1)
This joined stool [above] and form [below]share a decorative element that is simple and effective. Instead of turned decoration between the joinery on the stiles, the maker shaved stopped chamfers. In the case of the form – an elongated joined stool, stretched out to bench-length – the “stops” form a pattern often now called a “lamb’s tongue.” Similar treatments are commonly found on the interior parts of 17th-century New England framed houses. Note also the breakthrough on the upper corner of one front stile. Here the mortise for the end apron was chopped just a little too deep in one spot, leaving a hole in the face of the stile. It has still held up for the past 350 years or so. Photos Courtesy of Sotheby’s
In the end, what we learned was a discipline in two related crafts: that of the joiner/turner in the shop, and that of the furniture historian, using artifacts, archives and documents to better understand these 17th-century trades.
Early on, we decided to focus on the joint stool as an introductory project that encompasses most of the basics of joinery. The stool requires only short lengths of timber, and except for the seat board, narrow dimensioned stock. This makes it easy enough to acquire the necessary timber, without a great expenditure of time and effort. The principle elements of joinery – riving and working the stock directly from the log, and cutting and fitting the drawbored mortise-and-tenon joints – are well represented in this project. After a few stools, the progression to more involved joinery featuring paneled work is not a huge leap.
This stool was bought at auction in 2011, with no known history. It certainly appears to be a New England joined stool, although it is hard to link it to known works at this time. All its rails are riven and wedge-shaped; some are hewn, others are just as they came from the log. The pine seat is no doubt a replacement, but like several of the museum pieces here, the stool retains much of its turned feet. The shape of these feet differs from the top of the stiles’ turnings; usually the feet repeat what happens above. The stretchers are planed with the same crease moulding as the aprons, but the aprons have the additional run of an edge moulding also. The stool has been stripped of its finish, but traces of red paint remain throughout. Private collection
(1) Peter Follansbee and John Alexander, “Seventeenth-Century Joinery from Braintree, Massachusetts: the Savell Shop Tradition” in American Furniture, ed., Luke Beckerdite, (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996) pp. 81-104.
“This past weekend, I knew I needed to test a new pasta board design…but hadn’t had time to sort out what I’d do with the pasta. Then when I’m out running errands, I spot some beautiful in-season asparagus at the local farm, which was nice and thick, just about the diameter of the cavatelli I was going to be making! Quick blanch and ice water bath on the asparagus, simple butter sauce with lemon juice and splash of white wine, finished with burrata, lemon zest, and of course an olive oil drizzle. Late spring on a plate!”
This paragraph from a recent Instagram post pretty much explains why I wanted to interview John Welch for the blog. John is a guy who primarily makes beautiful things out of wood for the preparation and serving of food. He’s not a furniture maker (though he certainly could be); his posts are not about dovetails, or techniques for finishing. Rather, he is motivated by a desire to “take something ordinary and make it special.”
The photo that accompanied the quotation at the head of this post.
The love of food has always been there.
When asked what brought him to the world of pasta molds and boards, he answered simply “I love food. I love cooking food, eating, all kinds of food.” Add to this his observation that “too many people have beautiful things that are too precious [to use],” and you’re on your way to understanding what drives this man to finish most days at the office with several hours of work in his shop. What could be simpler than pasta – a basic dough of flour, salt and water? But roll a pinch of that mix across a board carved with decorative patterns, and you’ve elevated the plainest of pastas to an art form – as pleasing to the eye as it is effective at capturing a spoonful of saucy goodness and conveying it to the mouth.
Texture aplenty in pasta made with parsley and saffron, respectively.
Evidence that food and woodworking belong together: A third-year birthday cake in the shape of a handsaw.
The origin of his interest was basically curiosity, John said in reply to my question about what got him started.
“I wanted to know if pasta could take and hold an impression. I assumed it would but had never seen a textured ravioli. I made my own mold first, then I did some Googling to see if anyone already made something like that.” John could have ordered a mold to use as an example but decided against doing so for a few reasons. “I am always very afraid of inadvertently ‘borrowing’ someone else’s idea, so I thought that the less I looked at them, the less likely I would happen upon a similar pattern or idea. Also, the motivation to make them was…a curiosity [as to whether] it’d work, then how to make it work; if I had one in hand, it’d be easier for me to reverse-engineer and that would have taken all the fun out of it! I didn’t make them with the intention to sell. It was just a fun project.” It took John a few attempts to figure out how deep the carving would have to be to show up on the pasta and remain sharp after cooking.
The first one he was happy with featured a wheat pattern loosely based on an example of Art Deco ironwork. Made in walnut, it had leaves in the corners; he put stars between them.
Early pasta mold.
A savory pumpkin ravioli. To see how John served it, go to the end of the post.Food preparation images by Jenn Bakos Photo.
The filling is pumpkin-based.
Flattening a small piece of dough with an old-fashioned rolling pin before running it through the pasta mangle.
Woodworking This is not a story about someone born into a family of woodworkers or generations who have made their own pasta from scratch. John’s forebears are not Italian; most are Irish mixed with French-Canadian. The “Francis” in his business name is his middle name; he’s John Francis Welch V.
The first spoon John carved, in process. The bowls for his ravioli molds are done with a router and jig.
John, the eldest of three siblings, grew up in a late-1800s house where his father always seemed to be engaged in repairs and maintenance. Although his dad didn’t compel or even expect John’s help, he exposed his older son to many aspects of home repair and restoration simply by carrying out household repairs and improvements.
As a woodworker, John is self-taught. When he was a kid his family didn’t have cable, but John could watch PBS, where he became a regular viewer of “The Woodwright’s Shop” and “The New Yankee Workshop.” He found the content interesting but had no intention of ever applying what he learned in real life. Even so, some of it sank in.
Teddy bear chair.
His parents loved handmade gifts, things from the heart. John dabbled in woodworking during high school; he was going to give his girlfriend a teddy bear and had decided to make an oak chair for it. His dad helped him cut the parts to size; then John built the chair with mortise-and-tenon joints. His mother had woven some baskets, so based on her example, he decided to weave a seat.
After that, woodworking went on the back burner as his interests shifted to motorcycles, fast cars and weight lifting, which led him to certification as a personal trainer. On his website you’ll find a portrait of John with bulging biceps that might lead you to wonder whether he’s more interested in appearances than substance. Not a bit of it. In middle school, other students had pushed him around, grabbing his books. His dad encouraged him to develop his muscles saying, “If you were strong enough to hold onto those books, they wouldn’t be able to rip them out of your hands.” So, as with most things that piqued his interest, John picked up that ball and ran with it.
The obligatory motorcycle.
He worked as a personal trainer in college, then, in his late 20s, he got into competitive power lifting. “I tend to be very goal oriented,” he explains. “I was losing focus – ‘Why am I going to the gym at 5 a.m?’ I’ve always been a very curious person, both [in terms of] ‘how does that work’ and ‘can I do that?’ Power lifting was very different from anything I’d done before.” The goal of competition provided just the oomph he needed, not just to keep going, but to excel. He won his first competition.
When John bought a townhouse in 2009, he had some home improvement projects in mind. He bought a miter saw and put up crown moulding, then replaced some doors. After the first few projects, he ran out of things to do. John was godfather to the daughter of a good friend; for her first birthday, her mother put in a request for a toy box. “I think she was expecting me to throw something together with plywood,” he remembers. “But if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it well.” The toy box became his focus that summer. John had bought some handplanes on eBay; his brother deals in antiques, and John had tagged along on some of his adventures, which exposed him to more tools. He learned to sharpen. He bought some rough-sawn lumber and got started, building the toy box with stub tenons and solid wood panels. If it lasted, he figured, someday it could be used as a chest to store things other than toys. He worked in the garage, with a pair of sawhorses, a router, miter saw, circular saw and set of Kobalt chisels from Lowe’s.
A toy chest John made for his goddaughter.
The toy chest with finish.
In his day job, John designs extrusion dies for pasta at De Mari Pasta Dies. He was the first employee in the business who was not related to the founding family. Most of their products are in large chain grocery stores around the United States. “Every cartoon [mac and cheese made by one of the nation’s largest food corporations] for the last 15 years, I have personally designed all of those.”
While he appreciates his work and gives it his level best, he says, “I work my 8 hours and leave. With woodworking I can make what I want to make. It gives me the freedom to do what I want to do.”
For a time, he used his garage as a woodshop. He had to come up with some items to make that would need little space and very few tools. Spoons were one candidate, a handmade item that would “add a lot of love and care” in the preparation of a meal. His business took off from there.
As part of his day job for a time, John oversaw the installation of major pasta-making machinery at facilities around the North American continent, mostly in the Midwest, but with a few trips to Washington State and Canada. The travel for work underscored that his decision to buy a townhouse with his wife, Kara, a training specialist for a property management company, had been sound; their home required far less work than would have been required by a house with multiple rooms and a yard to maintain. While traveling for work, he had to use the garage for his car, not woodworking.
When the travel for work slowed down and John again had time for woodworking, he needed a studio space to rent – either that, or he and Kara would have to move to another house. The first studio he rented and the couple he rented after that were at Western Avenue in Lowell, Mass.; in June of 2021 he moved to his current space, 240 square feet in a repurposed textile mill that had been turned into artist studios. As he later learned, the building is the same one where his great-grandfather had worked decades before as a “grease monkey,” maintaining machinery for one of the mills that made Lowell, Mass., such a late-19th-century economic powerhouse that many still think of it as “the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution” (at least in North America). John’s great-grandfather also did some woodworking on the side. He built the house where John’s paternal grandmother grew up, followed by his own father, and where John’s parents continue to live. His great-grandfather had made a grandmother clock as a gift for John’s parents; today John keeps it in his studio.
The grandmother clock.
At this point, he says, “My goal was to pay the rent for my studio. If money was no object, I would make mirrors, wall sculptures, hand-carved tabletops. But the ravioli molds caught on.” When he started, charcuterie boards were a transition after the toy box for his goddaughter.
John is constantly looking for ways to improve his processes – to carve the ravioli molds, he’s upgraded his tool chest with some chisels from Japan, and he now makes some of the decorative patterns with a router. “As much as I love carving,” he acknowledges, “it gets to a point where it’s not financially feasible. I don’t really make spoons anymore; it’s partly because I can’t charge enough to make it worth it.”
This concern with workflow is a holdover from his day job, where he’s required to maximize efficiency. “I’ve always been more Type A,” John remarks. “The other artists at my former studio would tell me ‘You’re not a real artist,’ because my studio was so clean. I’ve always been like that: If something could be better, why not make it [so]?”
Some might have burned out after 300 ravioli molds, the number he sold in 2021. Not John. He plans to keep making them. “Part of what’s kept me going is that with the internet, a lot of people who buy them make these incredible dishes. I can’t tell you the rewarding feeling it gives me to see people feeding their friends and family with molds I’ve made.” He hopes to do more carving – art pieces, textured mirrors and more – but acknowledges the struggle involved in “going from ‘practical’ things to things that are meant [primarily] to be looked at. I blame it on my Yankee upbringing not to engage in ‘frivolous’ things.’”
He also continues to make a smaller number of other wares, such as charcuterie trays and pasta boards.
Carved bookend.
Carved platter.
Carved platter, underside.
Carved platter, detail.
Side table with carved top.
“I mentioned that I like to cook, but I LOVE to cook, and most of all explore with food. I love that the possibilities are endless, there is so much to learn, so much freedom of expression allowed. I love that you can travel to distant lands that you may never otherwise get to experience, all through flavors,” says John. “So with that said, my kitchen adventures have been pretty thorough: sausage making, curing meats, smoking, bread baking, pasta making (obviously), pâté and terrines, sous vide cooking, etc… About the only thing I don’t dabble in are baked sweets!”
Selfishly, I’d like to think it’s just a matter of time.
Spinach-ricotta filling.
Crispy prosciutto tops the pumpkin ravioli with brown butter sauce.
The set of templates makes it easier to build the Staked Armchair from “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” but they are also a good starting point for many of the chairs in “The Stick Chair Book.” The seat and arm shape is the same, as are the leg locations and stick locations. So the templates are a good place to start exploring chairmaking.
(FYI, we also carry full-size paper patterns for the five chairs in “The Stick Chair Book.” These need to be adhered to your own wood and cut out.
The templates are laser cut in Ohio. If you want a set, don’t tarry. We might not stock these permanently as getting the raw material is getting harder and harder.
Bank note for Braunschweiger Staatsbank, 1921, Falkenstein/Bildagentur Historical Collection.
Have you ever worked with someone who, despite being given detailed instructions, never gets the job done right? (Don’t answer that if you work by yourself.) The end of another workweek is a good time to meet, or be reintroduced to, Eulenspiegel. He has a five-hundred year history in European literature with his exploits translated into multiple languages. His first name is variously Dyl, Til or Thyll. His surname might be shown as Ulenspiegel and in English he is Owlglass or Howlglass. His stories have been studied by historians and humorists as they provide another level of detail about 16th-century life and society.
Cover of the 1515 Straßburg edition, woodcut attributed to Hans Baldung Gruen, student of Albrecht Dürer.
Eulenspiegel Who? Till Eulenspiegel was a fictional character in a series of tales were written in Low German and published in the first decade of the 16th century. His stories take place in the 14th century with his birth in 1300 and death in 1350. Although he travels elsewhere, much of his story takes place in Northern Germany. Eulenspiegel means owl mirror and he is depicted with both an owl and a mirror on the covers of his books. He is a wily rogue and through his antics he exposes hypocrisy, greed and foolishness in all he meets. He spares neither the aristocrat nor the common man.
The humor in Eulenspiegel’s exploits is how he carries out the exact commands given to him, no more, no less. Those who employ him make assumptions, react favorably to his assurances and later feel the consequences of their readiness to hire this unknown person. The owl and mirror, symbols of wisdom and reflection, are much lacking in those you are unfortunate enough to meet Eulenspiegel.
The tales of Eulenspiegel are bawdy and earthy (not to mention inordinate quantities of excrement) as was typical of 16th-century humor. If you have read editions published in the latter half of the 19th century and in the 20th century the indelicate bits have been taken out.Although some of you will be disappointed, there were no indelicate bits that needed to be excised to present the tale of Eulenspiegel and the Carpenter.
How Eulenspiegel Became a Carpenter in Dresden and Failed to Win Much Praise
Eulenspiegel came into Dresden, near the Bohemian forest, upon the Elbe River and declared himself a carpenter. It so happened, to his good fortune, that a master carpenter in the town heard of this, and lacking his own journeyman due to Blue Monday, hired Eulenspiegel to be his journeyman.
The master was to attend his cousin’s wedding that afternoon and was pressed for time to have a job completed. He told Eulenspiegel of the wedding and instructed his new journeyman to work diligently and glue four boards together for a table. Eulenspiegel asked to be shown the boards. The master took the four boards and stacked them together on the bench. Satisfied his new journeyman knew what was need, the master informed Eulenspiegel he would return late in the evening and departed for the wedding. Eulenspiegel got to work.
Woodcut from “Eulenspiegel Keimensweiß” by Johannes Schmidt, 1572. This was an edition written in rhyme.
He bored holes in each of the boards and stacked them together, one atop the other. The glue pot was put on the fire to heat and when it was ready he poured and brushed the glue to bind all the boards together. He then carried the boards to the roof so the glue would dry in the sunshine.
17th-century woodcuts of Eulenspiegel working as a carpenter, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University.
When his work was done Eulenspiegel make it an early night and went to bed. The master and his wife returned late in the evening, both tipsy and a bit befuddled. He roused Eulenspiegel to ask about the day’s work and was assured that all was done exactly as requested. The master was pleased to have found a good worker and remarked to his wife that one does not find such a good fellow every day.
Early the next morning the master bade Eulenspiegel to show him the table top that had been glued together the previous day. When the master saw how Eulenspiegel had ruined the boards meant for a table, he was enraged and demanded to know where Eulenspiegel had learned the art of carpentry. Eulenspiegel was confused to be asked such a question and said as much. The master shouted that Eulenspiegel had spoiled costly wood. Moved by the master’s anger and shouting, Eulenspiegel responded he had only done that which was commanded and if the wood was ruined it was the master’s fault not his. Grabbing his iron square, the master shouted to Eulenspiegel to be gone his workshop, for of the work that was done he would have no profit. Thus, Eulenspiegel departed with very little praise for his work.
Eulenspiegel’s End
The last few tales of Eulenspiegel’s life relate his death and burial in 1350. His burial was a very appropriate ending for such a waggish character. As the story goes, a hollowed-out tree was used as his coffin (or perhaps a regular wooden coffin). Two ropes, one at each end, were used to lower the coffin. Unfortunately, the lower rope broke and the coffin was stuck standing upright. Those attending the funeral decided to let his coffin remain as it was as it seemed a fitting burial for Eulenspiegel. His tombstone was sculpted with an owl holding a mirror in its talons.
Eulenspiegel’s burial from a broadsheet illustrating Eulenspiegel’s life, 1729, British Museum.
There are many notable people from human history whose burial sites are unknown, but there is no doubt about where Eulenspiegel’s fictional remains are buried. As a measure of his beloved status there is tombstone that still stands (or pretends to stand) in Mölln, Germany.
If you are a newer reader of the LAP blog and puzzled by Blue Monday (or are an old hand and want to relive your youthful hangover days) you can read a post I wrote about Blue Mondays here.
