Appendix 4: A Century of Woodworking Manuals

Headnote for Bibliography of a Century of Woodworking Manuals (under construction 6-22-07)

Two Pivotal Decades: the 1920s and the 1950s

As the 21st century unfolds, it’s only natural to reminisce speculatively about the last century’s impact. Change in all areas abounds, especially during the two pivotal decades the 1920s and the 1950s.

Both decades followed the economic and social changes and industrial innovation generated by a major war, WW I and WW II. The two decades, were, each in their own right, periods of rapid social, economic, industrial change.

(What else? Definitely education and scholarship. While scholarship of the era is not entirely relevant to the topic at hand, a history of the amateur woodworking movement, in a way this scholarship is, if only because the 1920s saw the flowering of several disciplines, especially sociology, social and cultural history, that are so important today for revealing the formerly hidden aspects of the daily lives of Americans.

Below, for example, in arguing that a parallel exists between the function of the cookbook in the kitchen and the woodworker's manual in the woodshop, to build the case, I depend upon an existing scholarship on cookbooks. In turn, though, this scholarship of cookbooks itself is supported by decades of scholarship on America's cultures. About a decade ago, when writing about the background of subject-specific dictionaries as cultural artifacts, I needed to review the cultural function of common-place, "lexical" dictionaries:

... Since the invention of the printing press, text printed on paper is without question the most common medium for the transmission and preservation of discourse. Among printed materials, the book is the most common, and comprises numerous genres. Among genres of books, dictionaries, that is, both lexical and subject-specialized dictionaries, are perhaps the most ubiquitous. In the Western world (is it fair to speculate?) few households are without dictionaries. Why? Dictionaries are the “memory” of our language, the “authorities” for the meanings, including changes in meaning, of the words in the vocabulary by which human communication takes place. In a real sense, then, dictionaries are so “commonplace”, that we tend to take them for granted. Thus dictionaries are not arbitrary creations but spring from the assumptions, both explicit and implicit, of the age in which they are written, and since they incorporate an era's intellectual history, the comparison of dictionaries from different periods allows us to detect changes from one era to another... .

The 1920s saw electrification, radio and pop culture, automobiles, road building, the Red Scare, and the shift "from production to consumption.” (More on the the concept, "from production to consumption" below.)

The 1950s saw TV, education, religion, pop culture, education and scholarship, interstate highway system, anti-communism and Cold War. What else?

Parallel Nature of Cookbooks and Woodworker's Manuals.

For the Woodworker, woodworker's manuals, in their function in the amateur woodworker's shop, are virtually identical to that role served by cookbooks in the housewife's kitchen.

In both cases, these respective operations are almost always conducted in a home setting. Since, though, eating is something done by every human, cooking occurs on a larger scale than amateur woodworking. In ? it was estimated that -- out of a total of ? households -- one million households in America were woodworking homes. both cookbooks and woodworker's manuals have a strong prescriptive theme, prescriptive meaning that authors "prescribed" to readers how cooking procedures were conducted.

Cultural Role of Cookbooks

"[C]ookbooks are as much about reading and fantasizing and experiencing how other people do things in the kitchen as they about cooking per se." (Daisy Maryles and Dick Donahue, "Who's Minding the Stove?" Publishers' Weekly, July 26, 1999, p 36, as cited by Jessamyn Neuhaus, p 280.)

(In the preceding sentence, instead of a cookbook, to shift from cooking to woodworking, think of woodworker's manual, change a few words, and -- in my opinion, anyway -- you have a viable concept of a wannabe amateur woodworker, dreaming about what to produce in the woodshop.)

Cookbooks, perhaps to a greater extent, even, than woodworker's manuals, have been tools used by individuals responsible for designing and maintaining kitchens, pantries, dining areas, for acquiring cooking appliances and utensils, for acquiring raw food, for composing meals, and for creating individual dishes, (Since all my life I have been simply an onlooker in such operations, I have probably not included essential ingredients -- pun intended -- in this conceptualization. By examining cookbooks decade-by-decade, cultural historians definitely could begin to visualize the impact of technological advances and such matters as dietary changes impacted given populations.

For this analogy between cookbooks and woodworker's manuals, the model cookbooks, I have in mind are Fannie Farmer 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book and Irma S. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking.

Considered the one of the greatest of American cookbooks, Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book  was acclaimed for a number of innovations. It was the first to use measurement, now considered standard in American cooking, for example, a level cupful, teaspoonful and tablespoonful. As well as giving reader's simple directions, Farmer showed a hitherto neglected concern for nutrition. Novices and experienced cooks contemporary to the period were introduced to a large amount of information, from instructions for building a fire to how to bone a bird. By 1947,  when it was a half century old, it had sold two and one half million copies.

The most popular cookbook in the United States, Joy of Cooking,  was first published in 1931. Rombauer (1877-1962) simplified many recipes for American kitchens and modernized recipes for changing tastes. Since it first appeared in 1931, almost 10 million copies have sold, and it has never been out of print. It has been updated numerous times, and each new edition is designed to reflect the changes and innovations in both technology and dietary practices in the American kitchen.  

(For more on the cultural impact of Rombauer's Joy of Cooking, checkout this 20-page, online paper by Elaine Cheong, a third-year student at the University of Maryland, 2000. Entitling her paper, "Cooking with Politics, Economics, Science and Technology: Book History and the Joy of Cooking, and citing over twenty sources of information, she  covers such topics as "overview and editions", prohibition, great Depression, World War II, Global economy, science and food, technology and the kitchen.)

Not surprisingly, cookbooks in the twentieth century mirror the history of middle-class life. With their roots firmly in the "scientific" cookery tradition of the nineteenth century, modern cookbooks reflect both the wide-spread move away from the hired cooks and servants in the middle-class home and, after about 1920, the changes in kitchen technology and food processing. For social historian, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, the 1920s constitutes the "industrial revolution in the home":

kitchens  are as much a locus for industrialized work as factories and coal mines are, and washing machines and microwave ovens are as much a product of industrialization as are automobiles and pocket calculators. A woman who is placing a frozen prepared dinner into a microwave oven is involved in a work process that is as different from her grandmother's methods of cooking as building a carriage from scratch differs from turning bolts on an automobile assembly line; an electric range is as different from a hearth as a pneumatic drill is from a pick and shovel...

(See her "Industrial Revolution in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century,” in Terry S. Reynolds and Stephen H. Cutliffe, eds., Technology and the West: A Historical Anthology From Technology and Culture. )

(In my narrative sections on the 1920s, I will show that the revolution in the home was also reflected in the amateur woodworker's shop.  Electrification, begun in the mid 'teens, was widespread in urban centers by the 1920s, and had begun to penetrate into rural areas by the 1930s. Most important for a "revolution" in woodworking fractional horse-power induction motors furnished the "on-the-spot" power that scaled-down woodworker's machines needed. At the close of the 1920s -- with manufacturers like JD Wallace, Delta, Boice-Crane, Walker-Turner -- many small scale power machines circular saws, jointers, lathes, combination machines, where on the market for consumers.

On another matter, the growth of interest in home workshops: To sustain enrollment in industrial arts classes -- enrollment was declining because, with mass production of furniture, the old apprenticeship system was collapsing -- Industrial Arts teachers created the "home workshop movement". )

The Evolution  and Impact of Cookbooks

Naturally, the cookbook industry—and, in the context of a growing emigrant population, the ideas emerging about domesticity and gender— followed the rise of consumerism and a newly energized domestic ideology aimed at middle-class homemakers. General cookbooks in the 1920s and 1930s increasingly represented cooking as an artistic outlet for dutiful middle-class housewives. Authors sought to redefine cooking as an important and pleasurable part of the modern woman's domestic duties—a signal feature of white middle-class womanhood. Even while social and technological changes dramatically altered the middle-class American home, cookbooks bore evidence of how many Americans continued to believe that a woman's primary responsibility should be her home.

Cookbooks echoed a national debate about women's social roles in general and represented particular kinds of food and cooking as gendered. They helped to reinforce the notion that women had inherently domestic natures. (p. 2, Jessamyn Neuhaus. Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.)

Cultural Role of Woodworker's Manuals

 

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First published in 1944, Shea's Woodworking for Everybody has

1944: John Gerald Shea and Paul Not Wenger. Woodworking For Everybody. International Textbook, 1944.

This splendid woodworker's manual tells us many things about how woodworking as a hobby was growing in the 1940s. Early in the decade, an estimated 10,000,000 American men were summoned into military service through Conscription/Selective Service regulations. However, the top age was 35, meaning that there were many men, older than 35, left at home. What did these men do? Some, of course, especially farmers had their daily lives affected by the nation's war effort only in minor ways, -- say, like the impact of rationing of key foods, such as butter -- but others -- who lived in cities, were drawn into the nation's deployment into the War….

 

FIRST SCHOOL EDITION First printing, September, 1944 Second printing, January, 1945 Third printing, August, 1945 Fourth printing, June, 1946 Fifth printing, July, 1947; Total copies publsihed by 1947, 21,000.  

I don't think it is an exaggeration to claim that the four editions of this woodworker's manual make it one of the most significant documents of the woodworking "movement. Shea, himself, in the "preface" to his 1970 4^th edition, recounts the numerous events of  that movement, and how his manual meshes with it.  

PREFACE [to 4^th edition 1970]:

 

1952: John Gerald  Shea and Paul Nolt Wenger. Woodworking for everybody.         Scranton, Laurel Publishers; distributed by Grosset & Dunlap, New York.     1952, ©1944       187 p. ill. 29 cm. reprint of 1944 edition.

 

In the jpg above, in the right column, is the entry of the Shea manual in the International Textbook Co (Laurel Publishers), as published in the 1955 Publishers Trade List Annual . “Van Nostrand acquired Laurel Publishers in 1954, thus adding to its list 20 titles in the vocational industrial arts from this line, which had been the school department of the International Textbook Co. Laurel had been formed by International in 1951, the imprint appearing on ITC's trade titles.” (John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States: V 4, The Great Change, 1940-1980, NY, R R Bowker, 1981, p. 578.)

1953: John Gerald Shea and  Paul Nolt Wenger. Woodworking for everybody. 2d ed. New York ; Toronto [etc.] : D. Van Nostrand,  1953. xi, 207 p. : ill. ; 29 cm.

Conveniently juxtaposed together, the 1952 version of the 2d edition and the 1953 version of the 3d edition give us something to ponder. Why, early in the 1950s, is a 3d edition of a book following so quickly the issuance of the 2d edition?  Here are some thoughts: the 2d edition was selling at a fast enough pace to warrant issuing a reprinting, in antipation that all 2d edition copies would be sold before the 3d edition arrived on the market.

1953: Arthur Wakeling. ed. Home Craftsman's book of garden furniture. 1953. Home Craftsman Pub. Corp.

 

Indexed in Index to Handicrafts 1965

 

1953: DeCristoforo, R J. Power Tool Woodworking for Everyone. Dayton, OH: Shopsmith. A 4^th ed published in 1989.

At age 33, Decristoforo evidently was commissioned to write the Shopsmith manual early in the ‘50s decade, because this  first edition came out in 1953. After a long, successful career of writng on woodworking, Decristoforo died at 83, in 2004. Among writers on topics of amateur woodworkers in the last half of the 20^th century, DeCristoforo is probably the most prolific.

 

This title seems to be his earliest book. The Worldcat bibliographic database – it lists the holding of libraries worldwide -- registers 87 hits for books authored by DeCristoforo, but because of the nature of how individual libraries catalog their books, you cannot conclude that he wrote over 80 books, but the number isn’t far off.

 

In Reader’s Guide Retrospective database – its coverages stretches back to 1890 -- DeCristoforo’s first article, on metalworking, is 1947 (It wasn’t until the early ‘50s that the push for amateur woodworking was launched.) From my calculations, DeCristoforo was 26 in 1947, a young age to begin writing professionally, but evidently, he had a talent, because he spent his whole career writing, mostly on woodworking topics.) In all, Reader’s Guide registers 187 entries under his pen.

 

According to the entries in the Reader’s Guide Retrospective database, he didn’t start on woodworking topics until 1952, which puts him in sync with the do-it-yourself movement – see http://home.comcast.net/~rgmc36/creden_america_discovers_its_hands_1953.html

 

The Shopsmith manual itself was remarkable for its depth and comprehensiveness in showing how many woodworking operations the Shopsmith combo tool performed. The volume is over 300 pages – there are ten chapters -- with almost every page containing at least one photo or illustrative diagram, but often up to 5 or 6.

 

In the later ‘60s I acquired a 1947 Shopsmith model – 1947 is the year the Shopsmiths came on the market – with a very low serial number, that I used for several years. Soon after buying the Shopsmith, I located the DeCristoforo’s manual, and benefited many times from consulting it. (Although I no longer use it, since my Shopsmith is an antique in the genre of combo woodworking tools, I will not part with it.)