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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

“Oscar Onken and The Shop of the Crafters at Cincinnati” (Turn of the Century Editions) by M.J. McCracken and W. Michael McCracken is a delight to both read and examine in detail. The advertisements, the research, the solid footnoting.

All those details appeal to the part of my brain that collects the facts that form my understanding of how Arts & Crafts furniture was marketed and sold. But at the back of the book is the best part. It is for another part of the brain.

The authors included a facsimile of the first issue of The Lantern, a short-lived publication published by The Shop of the Crafters that I had heard of but had never been able to find. It is filled with advertisements (of course), but also a number of delightful essays (some almost polemics) that discuss furniture making and the utopian ideals of the American Arts & Crafts movement.

These essays are different than the writings of the Roycrofters or Gustav Stickley. Even though Cincinnati was surrounded by utopian communities, Oscar Onken was not buying it. Below is one of the essays. If you like this one, the book has many more.

— Christopher Schwarz

Shop Talk With Red Pepper In It

Every morning at ten the whistle blows at the Shop of the Crafters.

We don’t all quit work and listen to the talk of some long haired genius who can make anything but a living.

The way to produce art is to work at it – not talk about it.

But as we said before, every morning at ten the whistle blows

The men don’t quit work, go out and beer up.

Some shops down in the blue law districts blow the whistle and have the morning prayers.

We don’t. We have morning kicks.

When the whistle blows all the department heads of The Shop of the Crafters meet together in a room and kick.

In every large concern there is a lot of politics – not the rednosed, unupholstered stomach and watch chain kind, but politics within the business.

In most large concerns everybody hates everybody else; they divide into factions and each discuss the other behind their backs.

These ten o’clock meetings in our shop gives everybody a chance to kick at everybody else and to their face.

All air their feelings and opinions – it has the effect of figuratively sending their feelings to the carpet beaters every morning at ten. The feelings come out sweet and clean for the remainder of the day.

Good feeling makes good work.

Don’t get it into your head that the Shop of the Crafters is in the business for “the joy of the work.”

Don’t get it into your head that we wear neck ties like a front door badge of sorrow.

We’re just as money mean as some, yet not as mean as others.

We have a time clock in our factory, a cost card system and all the other little devices and conveniences common to dollar chasing manufacturers.

In some respects, though, we get at the result in a little different way, but the original money spirit is there.

We make a grade of furniture who want the real thing at a moderate price.

Not rich people nor poor people, but prosperous people.

We make good furniture, and good dollars are a bi product – on the principle that the reward comes from honestly supplying the wants of the patron – the dollars are incidental, but large and certain just the same.

We have been many years collecting the class of men to make our line of furniture. They work in agreeable surroundings, there is every safeguard to life and limb and we pay good wages – we would pay less if we could, but we must pay well in order to keep some other concern from hiring them away.

We have been for years perfecting the system to make The Crafter line. It’s no problem to make good furniture, but to make good furniture within the financial reach of prosperous people – that’s the question.

If we wanted to make furniture for the masses – make all dollars rather than furniture, we would go down in the country, build several acres of sheds out of hoop poles and sheet iron, buy all the wormy, sap-soaked lumber we could, hire every son of the soil that stuck his head over a clod, arm them with hammer and nails and, and after we’d sawed so many of their fingers off that they couldn’t play a cornet in a country band, why – we’d hire some more.

Money is easily made if you want to make it some ways.

The following is excerpted from “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown” by Christopher Williams – the first biography of one of the most influential chairmakers and writers of the 20th century: Welshman John Brown.

Author Chris Williams spent about a decade with John Brown in Wales, building Welsh chairs and pushing this vernacular form further and further. This book recounts their work together, from the first day that Chris nervously called John Brown until the day his mentor died in 2008.

Alongside that fascinating story of loyalty, hard work and eventually grief, “Good Work” offers essays from the people directly involved in John Brown’s life as a chairmaker. Nick Gibbs, his editor from Good Woodworking magazine; Anne Sears, John Brown’s second wife; David Sears, his nephew; and Matty Sears, one of his sons who is now a toolmaker, all offer their views of John Brown and his work. Then, Chris shows you how he and JB built chairs during the later years together (differently than what John Brown showed in his book “Welsh Stick Chairs”). And Chris goes into detail that hasn’t been published before.

Also included are 19 of John Brown’s best columns from Good Woodworking. Below is one of our favorites.

Stress seems to be a fashionable cause for much of the ills of modern society. Stress – it used to be called worry, or anxiety – seems to be constantly blamed for a myriad of conditions. We all aspire to a good standard of living, and the advertising industry has not been slow to tell us of the wonders of the modern market. So we reach out for new motor cars, household appliances, and an awful lot of expensive goods we don’t need. People talk of houses without central heating as though the occupants were living in abject squalor. The many billions of pounds owed to credit card companies reads to me like more stress. Evidently Father Christmas delivered 5 million mobile telephones this year, to add to the 35 million already in circulation.

My old pa in law, farmer Parker, used to say “A sheep’s worst enemy is another sheep,” the explanation being that if you put too many sheep in a field they will sour their own patch, and cause disease and parasitic infestation. Our population has not increased that much, but all this stuff we are encouraged to buy takes up a lot of room. The prime example is the motor car. Every house needs a garage, or roadspace for it to stand when not in use, then more roads to allow it to travel unhindered. More space is taken with single people living in large houses, a widow with three bedrooms. Many aspire to second homes in which to spend the odd week when on holiday. It’s wonderful to own all these things, but paying for them can be a hazard.

Jobs for life are a thing of the past. There is always the worry of not being offered a new contract when the present one expires. Companies “downsize” at the drop of a hat, it’s the easiest way of saving money. The rest of the staff have to carry the load, thereby causing more stress.

There is no one thing responsible for all ills, nor yet is one thing a cure. However, a large contributing factor in our own wild dissatisfaction is a feeling of powerlessness; we cannot do anything about it.

Everyone must now go to university. Why? Education, education, education! Is this so we can occupy our minds while waiting for the next Giro? Many of the degrees issued by village universities are not going to drop us straight into a well-paid job. Some have academic minds that can make good use of a course at a proper university. Now every one is encouraged to apply, and three years later, equipped with a Mickey Mouse degree, take an unskilled job and feel very resentful. More stress and hence the huge growth in head therapists and social workers.

A Return to Making
As I said, there is not one cure for all these problems, but I know one that will help. People should start making things again. We should open more technical schools, teaching in a practical manner all those skills, the crafts which we will always need, builders, plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, toolmakers, electricians, all the myriad jobs that will never be replaced by computers.

We live in an age when the best machine is the one that leaves the operator less to do. Yet everybody seems to be in a rush. It is a mystery I haven’t solved. We were promised electricity that would be “too cheap to meter,” and that our biggest future problem would be to find things to do in our leisure time. Our industries have been destroyed, our railways first decimated, and then ruined by greedy tycoons. I no longer believe anyone, and more and more rely on my own experience.

This year, for the first time in over 30 years, I had a few days in the hospital. It was not a major problem, but it took me a while to recover. Once I was back at work I made one or two fairly ordinary chairs that did not excite me. I was a bit down, and always tired. Then I made a rather bigger chair, did one or two things differently, and built what I think is a fine chair. I was intoxicated with the joy of this job and overnight I felt so good. I am always chasing the perfect chair, and every now and then I nearly get there, and this big chair was better than any medicine, I was my own therapist. At the time something gloomy was in the news, but I was unaffected, and I thought if only, if only, I could impart some of my joy to others. This chair, like all my chairs, was made entirely with my two hands and some good tools. It is handmade. I have been a long time acquiring the skills to do this. No set of plans – just the picture in my head. Doctor Brown really recommends this treatment. The only side effects are a buzz each time you see it, and when I can bear to take it to the gallery I will have a cheque, and the knowledge that someone has a fine chair. I cannot think of any drug that would improve on this treatment. I think it is now proved that the head is important in combatting illness or depression. Like a little boy tying his shoelace for the first time, “I’ve done it!!!” That is the best medicine.

The Mendlesham Chair
It is pure coincidence that we have a reader’s enquiry from Mr George Smitton of Southport, Merseyside. He writes “As a retired DIY hobbyist the joint between armrest and back supports on a Mendlesham chair are causing a problem. I believe they were dovetailed to be authentic. Can you advise?”

Well Mr Smitton, I can answer that question easily – I don’t know. But, I know where you can find out. There are examples in the V&A, there are 15 in the Christchurch Museum at Ipswich (including a rare set of four side chairs without arms) and some in the Norwich Castle Museum. I have pictures and text on Mendlesham chairs in several books, but none of them mention construction details.

The Mendlesham chair, or “Dan Day” chairs as they are often called, comes from a small area of Suffolk. Dr Bernard Cotton in his book, “The English Regional Chair,” has done exhaustive research, including parish records, to find the members of the Day family who could have been the original builders of this style. Basically the chair is a hybrid, the seat and undercarriage being pure English Windsor, while the back arms and curved arm rest are in Sheraton, or cabinetmaker’s style. Such a mix could be unsatisfactory, but this is far from the case. The legs and leg angles are more delicate than the average Windsor of the time, and the joined back, with squared posts and distinctive pairs of cross rails, joined with three small turned balls at the top and two at the bottom, finished with six sticks and a splat, makes this a most inviting and elegant chair.

In the book there are 58 black and white portraits of these fine chairs, some looking identical and others with slight variations. Dr Cotton is asking whether all these chairs were made in the same workshop, and by different hands in that workshop, or by different hands in different workshops? There is a complicated “cluster analysis dendrogram” which probably has the answer!

Ivan Sparkes, one time curator of the Wycombe Chair Museum, is easier for me to understand. He mentions that one of the Day family worked in London, where he may have picked up the idea for the Sheraton part of the chair.

If you agree with me that the definition of a Windsor chair is that of a seat, into which are socketed the leg, the sticks, laths or pillars of the upperworks, then the Mendlesham chair is a true Windsor. But, in construction much more care must be taken. Firstly there are only four mortices into the top of the seat for the upperworks, that is the back and arms. In a normal stick Windsor there can be 20 or more. This means that the joints must be well made. The bottom of the curved arm pillar is usually cut into the side of the seat, and either screwed into the elm seat with a dowel to cover the screw head, or dowelled in. It can be dovetailed vertically into the seat edge. The arms, where they meet the squared upright pillars, are “birdsmouthed,” as they are shaped to protrude out wider than the seat. If I were making one of these chairs, I would house the birdsmouth into the pillar about 1/8″, making sure to have a snug fit. Then I would insert a dowel through the pillar and into the end grain of the arm, using good modern glue. The latter is something Dan Day didn’t have! One has to be careful not to weaken the upright post by cutting too much away.

When making a replica of an old chair I am not sure whether I would use the word authentic. If the chair looks authentic, and the joinery is a good fit, and the whole is strong enough, does it matter if it isn’t the same as the original? Remember, the craftsman of old had probably made hundreds of similar chairs, that is his advantage. Mr Smitten has the advantage of modern materials, I am thinking of glue. All these joints, including the horizontal cross pieces must be as perfect as you can make them. These are very handsome chairs, and I am sure you will get great pleasure from making them, and then having them in your home. Good luck.

– Johh Brown, The Woodworker, Issue 106, March 2001

“Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown,” by Christopher Williams, is currently at the printer and will ship in March 2020. If you order before then, you will receive a free pdf download of the book at checkout.