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Made By Hand : Book Review’Tis been a while since last I posted to the blog. I’ve been busy sleeping a lot (and working on getting sleep apnea under better control), fiddling with publishing and watching reality TV. Yes, Virginia, I am becoming a Reality TV junky. Academy: Orange County Firefighters, Operation Repo, Animal Cops, Speeders and so on. After a lifetime of watching fine movies, I figure it’s about time to fill my head with stuff that really matters.
On to Tom Fidgen’s new book Made By Hand. I’ve read it twice already. Once to get the feel for it and once to read between the lines. I’ll refrain from a thorough review of the contents as Larry over at the Wood’n Bits Workshop has already covered many of the points I would have. Instead, I’ll comment on where I see this book sits in the current scheme of literature.
Made By Hand is a throwback to the 19th Century.
In the later part of that century we see the dominance of the Arts & Crafts movement along with Manual Arts as a theory and practice of education. Structure and formula crept into the world of crafts as a result of the move to machinery in the workplace and at home. Don’t get me wrong, I am a devotee of Arts & Crafts style furnishings. But there was and is an underlying production theorem to the design and creation of the style. Just take a look at any Arts & Crafts period trade catalog and you’ll see what I mean.
How is Made By Hand a throwback, you ask (perhaps belatedly, as I posed this statement a few paragraphs back)? The 1800′s produced a form of book for the enlightened gentleman (or gentlewoman who read her husband’s books in secret. Look, I’m not responsible for the time period) as well as for the schoolboy who sought to learn more of the outer world. Books exposing and discussing the secrets of trades and crafts were popular, thanks in part to folks such as Joseph Moxon (shameless shill), Peter Nicholson, Temple Thorold, James Lukin, Thomas Martin, etc. By the end of that century we see the works of Paul Hasluck, Barnard Jones, William Fairham and others as the Manual Arts movement held sway.
I have not yet explained why I see Made By Hand as a throwback book. But I’m getting there in a tangential way. The various authors I mentioned had one thing in common… they spoke directly to the reader. The books of the 1940′s through the 1970′s, when vocational schools were hyper-structured environments for those who couldn’t make it in the ‘regular’ schools (at least it was that way in New York City) were very, shall we say, authoritative. Ever try to read anything by Feirer? Trade Books were seen as text books for the blue collar worker. Very cut and dried, limited to facts and figures, engineering and production, process and result.
Made By Hand reads like a book of the 1840-1870 period. The style is one-on-one, you and the author. The conversational prose invites you to experience the subject much as did the author. You’re taken through the early stages of discovering woodworking, through the development of the book itself, through an introduction to basic hand tool use and on into beginning, intermediate and advanced projects. You’re left with the feeling that you have been sitting with the author in his workshop as he discusses his life as a woodworker.
The only thing missing from this book is the smell of fresh-cut wood. Perhaps Popular Woodworking can come up with a Smell-O-Book someday?
Till next, Gary