Small beads – 1/4”, 3/16” and 1/8” – are ideal for creating shadow lines and transitions between flat boards. The classic example is with tongue-and-groove backboards. If you add a bead on the face of every board with a tongue, the back will look finished, instead of something that has oddly spaced cracks.
But beads aren’t just decorative. They also protect corners. If I have an arris (a mid-falutin’ word for “corner”) that is vulnerable to damage, a bead can strengthen it.
Shown above is a classic example: These runners in this tool chest are going to get a lot of wear, and their corners are going to get whacked by tools and wood. By beading each corner, it is much less likely to splinter in service.
The beads also look nice.
And now that I have three beading plane sizes, I can even scale my beads – wider ones at the bottom and smaller ones at the top. Joy! Nerd!
“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”
— “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke
Warning: This is one of those blog entries that will make some of you wonder why you bother visiting here. You might just want to skip this entry and go play with your safety gear, micrometers and “Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition.”
As I’m waiting for the epoxy to harden on the half-scale model of a chair shown above, I’ve poured myself a stiff drink and am raising a toast to Jonathan Strange.
Strange is a magician in my favorite contemporary novel: “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke. I’ve been quite obsessed with this book since it came out in 2004. It is, and I do not say this lightly, the most finely crafted piece of fiction I’ve read as an adult. Every footnote is pure genius. And it reeks of a work that has been finely combed over like the garden at Versailles.
(Oh, and If I ever get a tattoo, it will be the silhouette of the raven in the book. Also: I am just as likely to get a tattoo as I am to start vaping my own ear wax.)
So Strange, the radical magician in the book, figures out that to do really interesting magic, one needs to be somewhat mad. The insane kind of mad; not the Lumberjocks sort of mad. As Strange is quite sane at first, he gins up all sorts of ways to induce madness. In the end, it involves cats (naturally) and drinking something awful.
And that describes my ideal writing and design process.
“I’m not going to a party; I’m a writer.” That’s what I tell the nice people at the liquor store when I arrive at the register with two boxes of wine and four six packs of potent beer. The wine is for my wife (also a writer); the beer is for me.
Lucy and I very rarely get drunk. The last time I got drunk was by accident (Note to self: Never drink casually with the Irish.) But Lucy and I do have a drink with dinner and then we have a drink after dinner. Then we write and talk and write.
I know that some odd souls are fantastic writers and designers when they are dead sober. I am not. I find that a drink helps. As does fatigue, stress, incredibly loud music and stupid external constraints.
Why? Who cares why. Feel free to make up a theory. I’d rather just use these tools that have worked (since 1986) to write and design stuff at 5 p.m. that seems out of my league at 11 a.m. And with these tools I don’t have to bifurcate my private parts (thank you, Mayan civilization) or vape my boogers.
So I say to the Stone Saison in my glass tonight: Bring on the madness.
Marco Polo is one of my heroes. That’s him and his fellow travelers on my favorite map the Catalan Atlas of 1375 by Abraham Cresques.
I enjoy tales of adventure whether it is the real life wanderings of Marco Polo or Ibn Buttata, the mythical adventures in the Odyssey, the Argonautica or Samurai Champloo. The last week has found me on the Silk Road following fables about monkeys and carpenters. It all started while trying to track down the illustrations of a caravan from a 13th century manuscript that had nothing to do with monkeys. Instead, I came across this image from 1222 CE and wondered why was a monkey apparently not helping a sawyer.
In short order, through the digital libraries of a dozen countries, I was tracing a set of fables and lessons from India, across the Middle East, the Iberian Peninsula and into the rest of Europe. I was following a monkey interfering with the work of a carpenter.
The genealogy of the curious monkey starts in India with the Panchatantra, a collection of parables composed in Sanskrit around 100-500 CE, with animals as the main characters. The stories are filled with jackals, lions, birds, turtles, cats, mice, monkeys and a few more species. At some point illustrations were added. As the written collection of stories moved along the trade routes they caught the attention of scholars leading to translations in Pahlavi (Middle Persian), Syriac and Arabic. After arrival on the Iberian Peninsula an Arabic version was translated to Hebrew and this led, in Italy, to the translation into Latin.
The path of the translations (and the monkey) was by no means linear, more like a spider’s web, and as the stories were translated some were altered or left out, while other collections of stories, such as the Fables of Bidpai (or Pilpay), were added. You might even find some of the stories from the Panchatantra in later versions of Aesop’s Fables. The names of a particular collection varied with the translation and includes, Kalila wa-Dimna, The Fables of Bidpai, The Lights of Canopus and the Latin translation, Directoriun Humanae Vitae (Guide for Human Life). During my digital travels I read the monkey’s fable in French, Italian and 16th century English, bumbled through the Latin and hacked my way through the Catalan and Spanish translations.
The actions of the animals in the fables cover the full range of human interactions and the consequences of those actions. The illustrations, from simple line drawings to paintings using the finest pigments, are not just decoration but an important part of of each story. As the writings were translated so were the illustrations. In my wanderings through more than a thousand years of storytelling there is a remarkable consistency in the illustrations, whether the monkey is alone or with the carpenter. With the availability of many digital manuscripts that consistency made my search for the monkey’s misadventures that much easier.
So, what was the story of the monkey and the carpenter? It is a short tale with dire consequences for the curious monkey (and his tail or other body parts). A monkey watches as a carpenter is splitting a log or plank; to aid his work the carpenter uses wedges. After the carpenter stops and leaves for lunch/tea/other necessary things the monkey jumps onto the log and intrigued by the wedges tries to remove them. In doing so he: gets his “tender parts” or his tail, or leg, or paw stuck in the cleft. The monkey’s suffering ranges from great pain to death. On his return the carpenter does not show pity, instead he adds to the pain and demise of the monkey. A grim story and you can draw your own lessons about curiosity, consequences, compassion and the disposition of your body parts while splitting logs.
Besides finding some new (old) images for the LAPAWS (Lost Art Press Archive of Woodworking Stuff) this trip along the Silk Road reminded me of how important the trade routes were in moving and introducing new commodities and ideas. In our time the trade routes we travel are the digital scans of written documents, websites and blogs. We discover and preserve our histories and perhaps learn a new thing or two.
The images in the gallery below range from before the 10th century to 1915. The earliest is a terracotta plaque showing the monkey on a log from the story in the Panchatantra (apologies-no clearer photo was available). Some illustrations are in better shape than others and you will see a range of artistic ability.
My favorite proverb for the tale of the monkey and carpenter is from a copy of the Panchatantra, “What business of monkeys is carpentry?”
Terracotta plaque, Temple of Paharpur, Bangladesh, before 10th c. (BULAC, Paris).
Syria, 1222 (BnF Gallic, Paris)
Persian, 1307-8 (British Library).
Egyptian, 1310 (BSB, Munich).
Persian, 1350-1400 (BnF Gallica, Paris).
Persian, 1391 (BnF Gallica, Paris).
Persian, 1413 (Topkapi Sarayi Library, Istanbul).
Latin, 1484 (BSB, Munich).
Persian, late 15th c. (Istanbul University Library).
Egypt, 1501 (BSB, Munich).
Turkish, 1510 (BULAC, Paris).
German, 1545 (BSB, Munich).
Arabic, 1669 (BnF Gallica, Paris).
Arabic, 1681-2 (BnF Gallica, Paris).
Syrian, 1700 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
As the public school is the lever by which the improvement of society must be worked, every effort to provide means of training for those who would otherwise be without it—every endeavour to give the children of the poor useful knowledge of common things—merits the support of every educational influence. And this brings us to the practical observation that toys ought to be made to advance education, whereas a majority of those furnished to children in this country do more harm than good. At least half of them should be burnt ignominiously as early corrupters of public taste. (more…)
I took kindly to woodworking. In fact, I was brought up in the woods until I was seven years of age. During these first seven years of my life I saw my father only occasionally, for he was a cabinetmaker by trade and worked in a smart little town about sixty miles distant from our forest farm and came home after intervals of about six weeks to remain with us but a day or two. When I was about seven years old my mother died and the remainder of the family father took with him to the town where he worked.
I went to school, but had a chance to run in and out of the shop as I pleased, and just about as the child learns to speak his mother’s language by sights and sounds long before it is sent to school, so I learned a great deal about cabinetmaking long before I took any tools in my hand to actually learn the trade. (more…)
