Woodworker Manual Author #1: Mario Dal
Fabbro -- Promoter of "Modernist" Furniture Designs Woodworker Manual Author(s) #2: Percy A
Wells and John Hooper -- Patrician Manual Writers Woodworker Manual Author #3: John
Gerald Shea -- Intrepid Writer of Woodworker's Manuals for Furniture of
America's Ethnic Cultures Woodworker Manual Author #4: Lester Margon -- Master Illustrator of Museum
Furniture Woodworker
Manual Author #5: Franklin H Gottshall -- A Little
Recognized "Classic" in Woodworking Annals
Woodworker Manual Author # 6: Walt Durbahn: From Master
Carpenter to School Principal to Lexicographer to TV Star Woodworker Manual Author (Corporate --
Stanley Tools) #7: How to Work With Tools
and Wood 1927 & 1952
Woodworker's Manuals #
8: Woodworker's Manuals in Public Libraries
Woodworker's
Manuals #9: Arthur
Wakeling and the Formation of the National Homeworkshop Guild in the
1930s Woodworker Manual Author #10: R J DeCristoforo -- "Dean" of Manual Writers
Woodworker Manual Author # 11: Aldren
Auld Watson, Self-Taught Artist, Self-Taught Woodworker
Random thoughts on
the role of Woodworker's Manuals:Any book that is gives
information on woodworking, whether how-to-do-it -- "processes" -- or
projects to build -- "products" -- is, in my rubric, a woodworker's
manual. Each chapter of my online history of the amateur woodworking
movement includes an annotated list of woodworker's
manuals published during that same decade.
One vexing research problem
in this history of amateur woodworking -- for the first half of the
20th century -- concerns how amateur woodworkers found out about what
manuals existed and how to get access to them. While John Tebbel's
4-volume A History of Book Publishing in the United
States (New York: Bowker, 1978) is outstanding as a
source for topics on mainstream publications, fiction, general
nonfiction, and the like, for specialized areas like woodworking or
cookbooks, coverage is sketchy, at best. John -- he's a friend -- does
discuss bookstores, and other types of distribution, such as newsstands
and books sold in large department stores such as Macy's, he does not
mention speciality fields.
We know nonetheless that woodworking books were published in
considerable numbers, which suggests that publishers saw them as
marketable. Further, starting in 1936, the Index to Handicrafts
was used widely in public libraries, and chapters of woodworking books
are well represented among the books contained
on its pages. Likewise, seeing an additional
source of profit, periodicals dedicated to woodworking such as Home
Craftsman, (1931-1965) each month published a full
page listing of manuals and other types of books from many publishers
that readers could order through Home Craftsman.
(Further, in going through Seattle Public Library's volumes of Home
Craftsman, evidence readily exists that a librarian
checked Seattle Public's holdings of woodworker's manuals against the Home
Craftsman lists.)
It's
obvious, too, that something happened in publishing, probably that the
volume of books published on handicraft topics, including woodworking,
became much larger because after 1974, the
Index
to Handicrafts
reduced itself to
exclusively indexing the chapters of books -- i.e., dropping
periodicals entirely, and then -- after 1984 -- simply ceased
publication, suggesting that the volume of books published had become
too great, at least for a strictly volunteer operation that the Index
to Handicrafts always was.
Taken together, then all these factors show that woodworker's manuals
were published in plentiful numbers -- -- but a lack of bookstores in
the first half of the 20th century made access and purchase of these
woodworker's manuals problematical. In contrast, in the second half of
the 20th century, as bookstores moved into smaller and smaller urban
areas, the possibility of woodworkers access to woodworker's manuals
became much easier.
After 1976, when woodworker's
periodicals such as Fine Woodworking
and American Woodworker emerged,
book clubs suddenly appeared along with these magazines and began
advertising in issues of these perioidcals. (I'll have to investigate
the woodworker's book clubs.)
And finally, used
bookstores became rich sources of books on woodworking, and in this age
of the Internet, buying used woodworker's manuals is possible through
outlets such as Alibris,
Barnes and Noble , and
Amazon. Until I launched on this project, the only "old"
woodworker's manuals I was familiar with were Franklin Gottshall's 1937
How to Design Period Furniture, R
J DeCristoforo's 1953 Power Tool Woodworking for
Everyone, and the 1950s Delta manuals, all with the
title How to Get the Most Out of Your [?].
(All of the latter I owned because of the vintage tools I owned.)
However, once I began working on this history of woodworking project,
it dawned on me that maybe woodworker's manuals were worth examining.
(In my earlier career, when I
wrote several books on historical subjects, I became convinced that --
to understand a given historical period -- looking at the documents
contemporary to the period was essential.)
Using the digitized
bibliographical database, Worldcat, I began assembling a list of
workworker's manuals. As the list was constructed, I began either
borrowing the actual volumes from libraries or purchasing my own
copies. Slowly it began to dawn on me what these books contained,
veritable treasure chest of memories of what amateur woodworkers were
confronted with, decade by decade, including whether they used hand
tools or power tools, what projects they preferred, etc. Next I began
to make notes -- annotations -- on manuals that I considered more
significant, and scanning images of recommended projects, the text of
"prefaces", "tables of contents", and the like.
Soon the list became
formidably long, suggesting
divisions by decade. Below are links to each decade, and exhibits of
how far I have progressed.
Finally, the Google Print Service is
beginning to payoff "bigtime". Books and Periodicals, vitrually hidden
away on the shelves of large libraries are increasingly available on
the Internet in fulltext, digitized versions.
For
example, Manual Arts
Press, a publisher catering primarily to the Industrial Arts, but to
home craftsmen as well. Google Print has uploaded the Manual Arts 1915
60-page bibliography of its books and selected books of other
publishers:
Books on the Manual Arts
.
For example, The Manual Arts
biblography describes as the
best and most comprehensive book on cabinfetmaking" this woodworker's
manual designed primarily for the furniture manufacturing trade, Percy A.
Wells and John Hooper's Modern Cabinetwork
Furniture and Fitments: An Account of the Theory and Practice in the
Production of all Kinds of Cabinetwork and Furniture With Chapters on
the Growth and Progress of Design and Construction Illustrated by Over
1000 Practical Workshop Drawings Photographs and Original Designs.
London: Batsford; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1909. ca 380
pages, 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 o f 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
Background
for Chart posted below:
The data
given decade-by-decade below come Worldcat database searches for books
on woodworking. (
Worldcat, a database of library records
for books, serials and other similar publications, contains over 50
million entries)
(Note: Rather than Worldcat, in her Manly
Meals and Mom's Home-cooking, Jessamyn
Neuhaus, p 321, uses the Library of Congress's "Experimental Search
System "
for creating a similar charting to mine, but for the publication of
cookbooks. I have yet to use the ESS unit, but think it worthwhile,
primarily because the LOC obtains, through the Copyright Act, a single
copy of every book published in America.)
Search command = WorldCat
results for: su= “woodwork*” and
yr: 1901-1910 [etc] and la= “eng”
and ((dt= “bks”) or (dt=
“ser”)).
From my survey of over a
century of woodworker's manuals, the rough equivalents of Joy
of Cooking are John Gerald Shea's 1944 Woodworking
for Everybody, and R J DeCristoforo's 1953 Power
Tool Woodworking for Everyone. when I have time, I will try
to determine what was the primary woodworker's manual purchased in the
1930s. This is important, of course, because starting in 1934, with the
formation of the National Homeworkshop Guild, literally hundreds of
individual clubs were organized throughout North America. (A reported
500 chapter by 1936.) Setting a modest 20 members
per club, the mathematics is clear: nation-wide, at least 10,000 active
amateur woodworkers, which is an appealing market for woodworker's
manuals. (From my knowledge of American publisher's, profits can be
made on sales of under 2,000 copies, and for most commercial
publishers, 2500 copies of a title is a standard figure.
In the chart below, notice that the reported
numbers of imprints for the 1930s, 321, exceeds
both the 1920s, with 282, and the 1940s, with 310.
I have yet to find the evidence, but I believe that with WW II being
declared in 1941, the National Workshop Guild collapsed. In my
investigation so far, I haven't discovered the smoking gun evidence
though.
Beginning with the 1950s, the steady growth in
numbers of titles, decade-by-decade, is nothing short of phenomenal:
growing from 416 to 1238,
and from 1901-1910 to 1991-2000, a six-fold increase.
|
English-language
publisher's output of woodworker's manuals, 1901-2000
Books
and serials: 1901-1910: 194 serials:
5
Books and serials:
1911-1920: 298 serials:
3
Books and serials:
1921-1930: 282 serials:
9
Books and serials: 1931-1940: 321
serials:
19
Books and serials: 1941-1950: 310
serials:
31
Books and serials: 1951-1960: 416
serials:
26
Books and serials: 1961-1970: 567
serials:
22
Books and serials: 1971-1980: 962 serials: 23
Books and
serials:
1981-1990: 975 serials:
47
Books and serials:
1991-2000: 1238 serials: 30
|
Decade-by-Decade
List of Webpages Dedicated to Woodworker's Manuals
1.
Woodworker's Manuals 1900 and Before
2.
Woodworker's Manuals 1901-1910 3.
Woodworker's Manuals 1911-1920
Document
1: P H Adams Reclining Chair May 1902
Document 2: A
L Hall Workshop at Home 1908 Document 3: H H Windsor How to Make a
Morris Chair Document 6: a 1904 article heralding
"The Significance of the Arts and Crafts Movement for Woodworking"
4. Woodworker's Manuals 1921-1930
Document 4: Otter Morris Chair 1914
(reprinted 1923)
Document
9: "Notes on Progress of the Use of
Electricity in the Industrial and Domestic Field" 1921
Document 11:
Paul V. Woolley's "The Importance of Projects in the Education of Boys"
1926 5.
Woodworker's Manuals 1931-1940
Document 12:
The formation of the National Home Workshop Guild 1933
Document
10: Hobbs Working With Tools 1935
6. Woodworker's Manuals 1941-1950
Document 8: Popular Science "How the
Hammer, Saw and Try-Square Can Satisfy" 1946
7. Woodworker's Manuals 1951-1960
Document 13: Gordon
B Ashmead "Precision Makes the Shopsmith" 1951
Document
5: Creden "America Rediscovers Its Hands" 1953
8. Woodworker's Manuals 1961-1970
9.
Woodworker's Manuals 1971 -1980 10. Woodworker's
Manuals 1981-1990
Document 7:
Mark Duginske, "Thoughts on a Working System." 1983
11. Woodworker's Manuals 1991-2000
12. Woodworker's Manuals 2001
and later
|
