Friday, November 30, 2012

1869 Carpenters' Shop

Earlier this week Joel Moskowitz, proprietor at Tools for Working Wood, posted a photo to his blog of a wonderful engraving he found while at the public library on the day after Thanksgiving.

The engraving, from the June 26, 1869 London Illustrated News, shows the interior of a "carpenters' shop"- really a cabinetmaker's shop if you ask me.  The men are building furniture here, not houses.

The library where I work owns a fairly complete run of this periodical, so I located the image in question and scanned it at high resolution to get a better look at it.  Here it is.


The level of detail in the image is wonderful.  In the foreground, two men work at low benches: one at a saw bench ripping a plank of lumber, the other sitting astride the stile of a panel frame while mortising it with a mallet and chisel.  As it so happens, I was working in just the same fashion just a short time ago, chopping mortises in the stile of the frame for the back panel of a book case I'm building.


Other delights abound in the image.  The man on the foreground left is working on a large glued up panel, perhaps a table top.  There are completed tables with lovely cabriole legs on the right.


I did a very small amount of manipulation of the image in Photoshop to clean up the image.  I removed some wording from the bottom of the image: after the title, on the original it says "-see page 641", a reference to the article in which the image is mentioned.  The article tells that the shop is part of a facility built on Vauxhall Bridge Road by the Guards, where soldiers could socialize and- in this shop- "learn the trade of carpentry."

If you'd like a print of the engraving to hang on your shop or office wall,  I've uploaded the image to imagekind.com at full resolution (600dpi).  From Imagekind you can select from a large number of sizes, paper types, mounting, matting and framing options.  For $16 you can get a 16"x10.5" print on enhanced matte paper.

Here is the full size scan if you'd like to download and print it on your own.  It is 6175x4048 pixels and about 25MB in size.

I hope you enjoy this image as much as I do!


Monday, November 5, 2012

Family weekend and Halloween

We've had two busy weekends, separated by a hurricane.  Crazy!

Two weekends ago was Family Weekend at the College of Wooster.  Maggie went down Friday afternoon to stay overnight in the dorm with her big sister Anna.  The rest of us followed on Saturday afternoon.  It was rainy and cold, but we managed to time our walks between rain showers.  

Here, we even caught the halftime show at the football game: marching band, pipes and drums, and Scottish highland dancers.


In the art building, they had crayons.  Made in the shape of cows.  I kid you not.


Siblings seeing the sights.

Monday following, the remnants of hurricane Sandy swept through, amplified by a nor'easter.  The combined effect was a mess in Cleveland as with many parts east of here.  Our home was spared the worst, but with power out and wires down in much of the city, Halloween trick-or-treating was postponed to Sunday.

Our little goblin didn't seem to mind.  This year, Grandma sent TWO costumes.  Here's Black Bart.


And for going out on a cold and rainy evening, the Fireman outfit was just the ticket!