This year has been a good one – maybe our second or third best since we started in 2007. I won’t have all the numbers for a couple weeks, but to close out the year, here are our top 10 books in terms of unit sales. There are some surprises.
The Anarchist’s Tool Chest: This book topped the list because we printed the last press run of the current edition in an original tan cover. (If you want a copy, you better snatch it because we are almost out.) I’m working on the revised edition, which will be in color and will be released in 2025.
The American Peasant: We sold out the first press run and we are now into the second.
Principles of Design: We printed (and sold) 3,000 copies in three months. We weren’t planning on doing a second run, but y’all changed our minds. This book will be back in stock in January.
Set & File: Not a surprise. This book sold well right out of the gate and has long legs.
Dutch Tool Chests: A surprisingly strong showing for a book that was released so late in the year (October). The book sold more copies on the first day than any book in our history.
Ad in the Nashville Banner, October 28, 1830 via “Tennessee Cabinetmakers and Chairmakers Through 1840” by Ellen Beasley in Antiques Magazine, October 1971.
Well before gaining statehood in 1796, carpenters, cabinetmakers and chairmakers were leaving Eastern Seaboard states to settle in Tennessee. They crossed the mountains using The Great Road (also known as The Great Wagon Road). They advertised their services in local newspapers and, very fortunately for me, and possibly for you, these ads were collected by Ellen Beasley, a researcher for the Historic Sites Federation of Tennessee. Her sources were newspapers and the 1820 Census of Manufacturers.
Following is a selection of advertisements and census information dating from 1809 to 1840 taken from Ellen Beasley’s article, “Tennessee Cabinetmakers and Chairmakers Through 1840,” published in Antiques Magazine, October 1971. At the end of the ads you will see capital letters which are keys to the newspaper or census source.
John D. Goss on the Price of Mechanical Labor and a Hearse Available
In 1824 John Goss traveled by horseback from Baltimore to Nashville. The earliest ad for his cabinetmaking business is from 1830 (see the top figure). Goss’ advertisements are a good example of the “cradle to grave” services carpenters and cabinetmakers offered to the public. The last line in the illustration at top is, “N.B. He has also prepared himself to make with great dispatch the last article to which his fellow-men requires on this side of eternity.”
His 1831 ad included a promise to charge Cincinnati prices and in N.B. “A hearse shall be kept in rediness at all times.”
In an ad from 1837 the end-of-life service is again noted.
Eastern Styles Made Here
A cabinetmaker’s ad often pointed out their ability to make furniture in the styles of the large Eastern cities. They were up against furniture dealers importing and advertising furniture from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and eventually Cincinnati.
You Made How Much ?
Where possible, Ellen Beasley matched a craftman’s ad to productivity information from the 1820 Census of Manufacturers. James S. Bridges was a chairmaker in Knoxville. An ad from August 1819 advises the public he has opened for business. At the end of his ad is a list of the shops’ productivity as found in the census (“Do” means ditto) and the census taker’s alternate spelling for chairs.
In the case of James Bridges we learn the types of chairs made in his shop.
Cabinetmaker John Ashton was located in Hawkins County in the northeast corner of the state. Without this bit of information from the 1820 Census we might not know of him.
Fine & Tasty Language
Many ads have similar language, likely the terms used were copy suggested by the newspaper. Mr. N. Bell, cabinetmaker of Lebanon,seems to have written his own copy and boldly claimsyou don’t have to go to the big city for fine tasty furniture.
A Bedstead Patentee
Many patents were issued that addressed the stability and comfort of bedsteads. Henry Boyd worked on improving the fastening of the rails to the vertical posts. A Thomas Early patent dealt with attaching bed curtains (one part of the whole range of bed clothes), a necessity in poorly heated bedrooms.
A Feud Between Chairmakers & a Forger Reported
When business slowed down it was a good idea to remind the public that you were still in business and where you could be found. In October 1810, Charle M’Karahan let everyone know he was still making chairs, and he could be found at the easy-to-remember location opposite the new jail.
John Priest set up his chairmaking business a couple years before M’Karahan. Here is his 1809 woodblock-print ad announcing his business. Nancy Goyne Evans included this image in her publications on Windsor chairs.
It seems within a year of M’Karahan settling in he had a disagreement with Priest over money. The feud was settled in court in December 1811 and Priest, with much apparent gloating, paid for an ad to let the public know.
About a year later Priest gave up chairmaking in Nashville and resorted to cabinetmaking.
M’Karahan continued to work in Nashville and issued a public service announcement in early 1813 warning that another chairmaker was a forger.
Malicious Mischief & Murder by Cabinetmakers
Chairmakers will be relieved to know they, so far, were not the worst in the furniture world, at least in Tennessee, and before the year 1840.
Malicious mischief is the willful destruction of property, either public or owned by another person. Phineas, with his rascally countenance and apparent lack of contrition, had no intention of staying behind bars and broke jail. I hope they caught him.
A nasty piece of work, is (was) this Kinchen Wilborn. When apprehended, he was well into Arkansas Territory (statehood was in 1836) and traveled almost 250 miles. The slippery scoundrel escaped and we don’t know if he was ever caught.
Marriage & Misdirection
Let’s throw ina turner for some comic relief. Ferdinand Rienman, a turner in Nashville, announced his wedding to Miss Susannah Rule via poetry. Clever.
Ulysses G. Smith, printer and cabinetmaker, took a different approach to marriage. He married Miss Rosannah Mc’Affy on February 1, 1827, with the newspaper announcement on February 7. One week later he ran an ad announcing he had taken over the establishment formerly occupied by his father-in-law, Terrence Mc’Affry, also a cabinetmaker.
Mc’Affry was well-known and respected in Knoxville. He had been in business as a cabinetmaker for about 27 years. Smith’s announcement took him unawares. He soon responded to Ulysses Smith’s claim in another ad.
Wait, there’s more! Mc’Affry, aged “upwards of 60 years” died in April 1830, with the report of his funeral in the April 14 edition of the Knoxville Register. A week earlier, in the same newspaper, it was reported Mc’Affry’s daughter sued Ulysses Smith for divorce. Oh, poor Ulysses, Rosannah chose not to be your Penelope.
Kudosto Ellen Beasley for matching up the juicy details of this cabinetmaker soap opera.
Cherry & Walnut Wanted
A good way to find out what woods were used by cabinetmakers and chairmakers in a particular area is to find this type of ad.
Runaway
Advertisements for runaway apprentices and enslaved servants were common. This ad, for an enslaved craftsman and two others, is notable for the large reward and the description of Perimus. He was obviously skilled and well-regarded by Burchett.
On the other hand, after an escape the usual course of action was to question and punish other enslaved in order to find out where the runaways were headed. Dyer County is in the far western part of Tennessee, north of Memphis. The runaways had a long and perilous journey to reach freedom.
At the Sign of the Large Chair
I have a particular fondness for signs depicting the article made and for sale within a shop. Big shoes, big lock and keys, big fish and so on. Did Isaac Barton have a chair painted on a sign or an actual large chair suspended from an iron support? Also, exactly how big was this large chair?
I’m Still Here
At the end of the year, a weary “I’m still here” is a sentiment many of us might feel, while others might lean towards surprised consternation. As for Mr. William Young, considering Shelbyville was not a one-horse town, including your location in your advertisement would have been a good idea.
N.B. Ellen Beasley’s work in digging up the advertisements for cabinetmakers and chairmakers before 1840 was a gargantuan task. It required many hours of travel throughout Tennessee to search through physical editions of newspapers, newspapers on microfilm and microfiche and deciphering the handwriting of the 1820 census takers. After working in Tennessee she continued her research work in Texas and in 1984 was named a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
– Suzanne Ellison
Today marks the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. Last year I wrote a short story, “The Long Night” for this blog. If you would like to read, or reread, the story you can find it here.
This chair is made of oak and elm. I call it a Carmarthenshire chair, as it is derived from an old chair from that county. The doubling on the arm-back terminates in a ‘swan neck’. This is seen on several old Welsh chairs.
“Life without Industry is guilt, and Industrywithout Art is brutality”
I came back to live in Wales in 1975. I had been made redundant and I was depressed. After years in a job I loved I had been told to go; my skills were no longer appropriate. I had been building wooden boat hulls for years, but now they needed men who could laminate plastics. Had I been prepared to don a plastic boiler suit, wear a respirator and work with nasty, sticky, smelly chemicals, I could have stayed. But I am an uncompromising woodman, I love it. My employers thought the adze as dead as a dodo, so they gave me a small handful of money and told me to pack my box. As I lived in a seaside resort there was not much work that I could do. I wasn’t cut out for selling ice-creams, no killer instinct! My mortgage would be unpayable without a good job. There were plenty waiting to buy my house, so I sold.
I was seven-years-old when we moved from the safety of a large family in the valleys of Wales. Auntie was school-teaching in Kent, Dad came out of the pit and became a bricklayer. So, after a lifetime away, I returned to the ‘Land of my Fathers’. What sort of a living could I make in Wales? There was plenty of building work, but I have a horror of the ‘wet-trades’. I can only work in wood. One day I saw a chair in the window of an antique shop in Lampeter. It was like a vision. I had never seen anything that had made so instant an impression on me. To my eyes this chair was beautiful. I had never had any interest in furniture or chairs. Like most people they were just the things you lived with. Now here was this lovely chair. I couldn’t afford to buy it, but I could make one like it. Well, that is what I did. I made one. It took a long time. Chairs of simple form like the stick chair are surprisingly tricky to make. When you’re building them you have to work from points in the air, angles of sticks, angles of legs; there are so many variables. Anyway, I was quite proud when I finished my chair. It looked alright. Of course, I wasn’t able to put a century or two of patina on it. Now, twelve-years-old, it begins to look right. Family “treatment” and a few thousand hours of bum polishing have done the trick!
At this stage I was interested enough to look for books on the subject. There are quite a few, both American and English. I still hadn’t realised that what I had seen in that Lampeter shop was something quite rare and unique – a Welsh chair. Then it was just a Windsor chair. I went to museums. I visited High Wycombe where there is a museum devoted entirely to Windsor chairs. They have a very comprehensive selection of Wycombe factory chairs and English regional chairs. I don’t think there were any Welsh chairs. The English chairs did not have the same spontaneity the same verve as their Welsh counterparts.
I enjoyed my youth. After the valleys I thought England was wonderful. The war started and we could not live in London, and through a series of events of which I have no knowledge, we ended up with a small-holding in the wilds of Kent. (There were wilds in Kent in those days!) We had no electricity, gas or sanitation, we grew much of our own food and kept chickens and a pig. We didn’t realise it then, but we were living the ‘Good Life’. We made few demands on the world’s resources, and I was happy. So, as the Lampeter chair was one step towards my rehabilitation, the building of a tin shed in a field I bought, and a change to the simple life, completed my return. I live very happily without electricity or any other services. I have a workshop, a wood stove and good health. There’s a saying applied to yachts, which applies equally to life, “Add lightness – and simplify.”
A neighbour asked me to build him a chair like mine. I tried to – but it came out different. It was alright, but it wasn’t the same chair. My neighbour was pleased. He has the chair now, he keeps it in the bookshop he owns. It then occurred to me that the reason for the diversity of pattern in the old Welsh chairs was that the makers did other things as well. They were not chair-makersas such, they were wheelwrights, coffin-makers, carpenters, even farmers. When there was need for a chair, somebody in the village made it, or they made their own. They didn’t have patterns and jigs for continuous production. They had no consistent supply of uniform material. They used their eyes and their experience. It was like a sculptor doing his work, they ‘thought’ the chair, then they built their ‘think’. Some of these chairs are a disaster to sit on, most uncomfortable, but they all have a kind of primitive beauty.
Two particularly good examples of Welsh stick chairs. The comb on the right hand chair isinteresting,for although it has no transverse curvature, the maker has tried to individualisethis lusty chair with a shaped profile.
I now had the idea that maybe I could make a living out of building chairs. I loved making the first ones; it was new and exciting. But if I was going to be successful I had to try to get into the shoes of the old Welshmen who made these lovely chairs, and try to work as much like them as I could. It isn’t possible to get very near it, life today is so different. I was convinced then, and even more so now, that the chairs were made as occasional items, and that none of them were made by chair-makers. Even with my small overheads, we do live in a total money economy – everything must pay. The lack of electricity has been a plus factor in my work. I have a strong back and don’t care for bills.
I am impressed with the simplicity of old Welsh chairs. I have long been of the opinion that the work of ‘fine’ joiners, work with highly complicated joints, all hidden in the finished piece, leads to clean lines and continuous surfaces which make the finished work uninteresting. I am often tempted to ask these clever fellows “and what’s your next trick?” The Arts and Crafts movement was responsible for a refreshing change. Ernest Gimson went to work with an English country chair-maker, Philip Clisset, to learn how to make simple chairs. Sidney Barnsley, working entirely alone, produced beautiful furniture with exposed dovetails; all the working showing. Of course, all this was over the head of the old Welsh craftsman. A great attraction of Welsh cottage furniture is its simplicity. So with the chair-makers, their work is the equivalent of naive painting. You hear people say “a child could paint that.” Try it!
So I had first to unlearn, and then learn. I was lucky in the order that things happened to me. First, I built some chairs – then I got the books and found out how it should be done. By then I was conceited enough to think that I was closer to the men that built the chairs, 200 years ago, than the sophisticated authors. I have no intention of telling anyone how to build a stick chair, but I will tell you how I do it.
Before I go on to tell you about my methods of work, it would be well if I tell you a little more history of the Windsor chair. First a definition: What is a Windsor chair? Fundamental to a Windsor chair is a solid wooden seat; everything grows from this. From this seat the legs project down, and the sticks or laths project up. That’s it. Arms, combs, fan-backs, balloon-backs, stretchers on the legs, different sorts of turning, a thousand variations – once a chair has a solid wooden seat with legs and sticks socketed into it, then it’s a Windsor. The English Windsor started like the Welsh chair as a peasants’ chair in the countryside. At the beginning of the 19th century, tycoons of the Industrial Revolution decided that what was good enough for Adam Smith’s pins was good enough for the Windsor chair. They set up sweatshops in the Wycombe area of Buckinghamshire. The surrounding beechwoods of the Chiltern Hills provided the material for legs, sticks and bent parts, whilst elm for seats was plentiful everywhere. Bodgers with their pole lathes worked piece-work in the woods, turning legs and stretchers, which they sold to the factories on Saturday evenings. In the workshops, bottomers, benchmen and framers did the rest. Wages were poor and conditions appalling, and even in the last century strikes were not unknown. The owners of the factories were not chair-makers but money-makers. Design had a low priority, but the chairs had one major advantage – they were cheap!
Chairs were made at Wycombe – year in, year out – by the thousands. Piled high on horse-drawn wagons they were shipped to London. A month or so before making the journey most of the parts had been growing in the local woods.
Dealers bought these chairs and they were sold on to the less well off. They were bought for public houses, church halls and other places of entertainment. They found their way into the houses of the rich – but only for the people below stairs. Her Ladyship wouldn’t be seen dead sitting in one. British class distinction at work, the chairs were cheap, so they were expendable. Like the herring, when kippered and rare, it was for the rich. When every fishing port had its smokehouse and they were cheap, then the poor could have them. When baked beans first came to England they could only be had at Fortnum and Masons!
There was no development on these cheap chairs. Identical designs on some types lasted for 150 years. These cheap chairs were exported all over the Empire (sometimes in knockdown form), and became known as the English Windsor. It beggars belief that there are today people making replicas of these chairs for sale in stripped pine shops. Fine cabinet-makers confined themselves to making joined chairs in the Sheraton and Chippendale styles. Some small Windsor chair-makers designed Windsor chairs with elaborate backs, highly carved splats, but used cabriole legs. These in many cases were very fine work, but a chair with cabriole legs is not, strictly speaking, a Windsor.
Collection of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.
Several weeks ago I came across an illustrated collection of tools held by Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ). The approximate date of the collection is 1740, which pre-dates Roubo’s “l’art du Menuisier.”
The collection, acquired in 1970, includes 84 illustrations. In the BAnQ’s description it is noted the illustrations may be from a catalog as there are prices and the number of tools noted on each page.
The tools were used by French military forces working on fortresses north of the Rhine. The construction of the fortresses began in the 17th century and were originally led by Marshal Vauban, famed military engineer.
As the tools were used to build and maintain military battlements, not all were used for woodworking. The gallery below has 20 illustrations, but there may be a few more (I was kicked off the website after falling to prove I was human).
You can view the entire tool collection held by BAnQ here.
“Sgt. J. Craig,” an oil on canvas by an unknown artist, circa 1870. (Courtesy of the Council of the National Army Museum, London)
The following is the preface of “Campaign Furniture,” by Christopher Schwarz.
For almost 200 years, simple and sturdy pieces of campaign furniture were used by people all over the globe, yet this remarkable furniture style is now almost unknown to most woodworkers and furniture designers.
“Campaign Furniture” seeks to restore this style to its proper place by introducing woodworkers to the simple lines, robust joinery and ingenious hardware that characterize campaign pieces. With more than 400 photos and drawings to explain the foundations of the style, the book provides plans for nine pieces of classic campaign furniture, from the classic stackable chests of drawers to folding Roorkee chairs and collapsible bookcases.
Like a dormant case of malaria, my fevered love for campaign furniture began many years ago without my knowledge – probably during some hot Connecticut summer.
My maternal grandparents’ home (and ours) was full of campaign furniture. When you drank tea with grandmother West, it was on a folding coaching table my grandfather had built. My grandfather, an enthusiastic woodworker, had brought back campaign brasses from his trips to Asia, some of which I still own. So his pieces definitely had an Anglo-Indian campaign feel to them. And when you visited the West’s house for the summer, you put your clothes in a campaign chest.
My father and mother were fond of the furniture as well. And when my dad built pieces for our home they were at times festooned with brass corner guards, brackets and flush-mount pulls.
As a child, I didn’t think much of the provenance of all this furniture. In fact, I assumed it was Chinese or Japanese furniture because my grandparent’s house was also awash in tansu, Chinese chests and ink paintings of landscapes and animals.
Eventually I wised up and sorted out the furniture record of all our households. The campaign style became a favorite of mine, and I wanted to build pieces of it for the magazine I worked for at the time, Popular Woodworking.
My fellow editors, however, were inoculated against the bug. There was almost nothing written about the style of furniture. And whenever we surveyed our readership, subscribers told us that there were three furniture styles they preferred: country (anything with a duck or pineapple on it), Shaker and Arts & Crafts. “Campaign furniture” was somewhere down the list near “narwhal nose guards” in popularity.
I persisted. I was rejected again. And after I stepped down as editor in 2011, I asked them one last time to publish two articles – one on campaign chests and a second on Roorkee chairs. After some wrangling and veiled threats, they said OK.
Early secretary – note the skeletonized pulls, the moulded top edge and the lack of brass strapping. This chest, circa 1800, was built by Ramsey & Co. Dimensions: 39-3/4″ H x 39-1/2″ W x 20-1/2″ D. (Courtesy of Christopher Clarke Antiques)
That was the start of my obsession with researching and building campaign furniture. Since 2010, I have been neck-deep in researching the style of furniture that I cannot remember living without. During the last 200 years, there has been surprisingly little written about campaign furniture, which also goes by the name of “barracks furniture,” “camp furniture” or sometimes “patent furniture.” There’s an excellent book by Nicholas A. Brawer that is the single reference work for collectors and dealers, but it is out of print. Plus there are some magazine articles.
Most of the knowledge out there on campaign furniture is in the hands of auctioneers, antique dealers and restorers. So my research began with their sales records, and that led me to the catalogs of the British furniture makers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Plus I dug up several helpful 19th-century books that sought to prepare a British citizen for a long trip abroad.
The real surprise from my initial research was that these pieces of beautiful “military” furniture weren’t just for the military. With the incredible expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century, there was an urgent need for a bureaucracy to manage the Empire’s colonies. (Brawer writes in his book that by 1897 the British Empire comprised one-quarter of the world’s land surface.)
So these campaign chests, folding tables, collapsible chairs and writing desks were in use by bureaucrats, writers, doctors, merchants – plus their families – all over the globe.
Even more interesting: The knockdown aspect of the furniture made it popular with city dwellers who were crammed into tiny city flats – it allowed them to convert a parlor to a dining room to a bedroom. And if you left England on a ship to colonize an island, such as New Zealand, this type of furniture filled your stateroom during the journey and your home when you arrived.
Oh, and if you were a student who left home to go to school, you might tote along some of these items, such as a folding bookcase and a writing slope.
In fact, the romantic idea that all of these pieces of campaign furniture were portaged on the backs of elephants through the jungle is mostly off the mark. In truth, most of these pieces of furniture were the workaday backbone of furniture for people who needed stuff that that was rugged, simple and a bit stylish.
And that idea – rugged, simple and stylish furniture – is what kept me coming back to the belief that campaign furniture is a sorely underappreciated furniture form.
As a woodworker, I love the first-class joinery: dovetails plus mortise-andtenon joints. The simple and rectilinear lines are easy for beginners to make and are as familiar as Shaker or Arts & Crafts items. If you’re not a woodworker, I hope you can appreciate the simple forms and clean lines that look good in almost any room, whether you fill your rooms with 18th-century stuff or Bauhaus. Campaign furniture fits in everywhere, across the globe and in every time period.
I think that’s true in part because it was truly an international furniture style. The roots of the style might indeed be related to tansu, as some have suggested, or in Chinese traveling forms, as others contend. But what is certain is that when Asian craftsmen saw these British forms they reinterpreted them for their customers. When their customers took these pieces back to England, the cabinetmakers there were influenced by the changes made by their far-flung brothers. And so forth and so on.
When I finally made that last connection to that circle, I didn’t feel so stupid about assuming that my grandparents’ campaign furniture was from Asia.
Regency chest. Even later chests, such as this circa 1820 Regency example, weren’t immune to changes in furniture style. Note the reeding throughout and the inset brass pulls that closely resemble traditional swan’s neck pulls. (Courtesy of Christopher Clarke Antiques)
It is my hope that this book opens your eyes to a style of furniture that was around for about 200 years – 1740 to World War II by some reckonings – and remains sturdy and stylish (if somewhat underappreciated) today.
This book is not an academic investigation of this furniture style – I will leave that desperately needed task to more capable researchers. Instead, this book is a too-short look at the furniture style from a builder’s perspective. My interest is in the wood, the hardware, the joinery and the different forms themselves.
I think that if you put your hand to building these pieces to the high standards of the 18th and 19th centuries, you will become fascinated – might I say “infected” – by their cleverness and soundness of construction.
Campaign furniture was meant to endure a mobile existence and do it with a bit of grace. To be sure, we are a more mobile society now than we were 200 years ago and sorely need furniture that is easy to move. And if you have bought any furniture in the last 50 years, you also know that most factory furniture is doomed to self-destruct within a few years.
We need campaign furniture more than ever before. Fill your house with it, and the ideals it embodies – sturdiness, simplicity and beauty – might just seep into the unconscious minds of your children or grandchildren as it did for me.
