Book 'em

Nothing quite compares to the feeling of completing a creative project.

Kim and I carried this completed book case out of the workshop and into the bedroom yesterday.  It's the first large piece of furniture I've finished in some time.  Sure, I've done plenty of other smaller projects, but this one has been simmering and slowly coming along for quite some time.  In fact, the drawings I made for it are dated 2008.  Kim reminds me that since then I've created a few other things outside of the workshop, but still.  Five years on a case piece is a long time!

I've written about this project before here on Commonplace.  There was a post about making dowel pegs from firewood.  I talked about preparing the lumber in this post, which also shows the inspiration for the project- an article written by Shaker furniture expert Christian Becksvoort.  His version can be seen on his site- boy howdy, I saved $4,500!  And yes, I adjusted the measurements from his example- my version is about 6" wider.  This post is mostly about Memorial Day, but there is a picture of the dovetails, freshly cut, that hold the case sides together.  And in this post, the shelves were but a drawing taped to the wall and a pile of lumber.

Here is the case with the doors closed, empty of books.  It is made from solid black cherry.  The wide lumber (the top and sides are 12" wide boards) comes from a memorable snowy day, probably 15 years ago, when I acquired it from a barn in western Geauga county- the personal stash of an octogenarian woodworker who could no longer make use of it.  I think of him and his kindness often when I'm working in the shop.  The small table in front is one of a pair that I built about 8 years ago.  The bed frame was built with the same lumber.

Dovetails are a mechanical joint, and here they connect the top of the case to the sides.  The shelves are also connected to the case sides with sliding dovetail joints.

I'm particularly proud of the perfectly matched door knobs I turned on the lathe.

 Here's the case, doors open, loaded with trout and fly fishing books.

The young apprentice says it measures up!

On adding vocabulary

Organology.

That's my new word for today, and it came to me through an internet-typical series of clickety-clicks. Here's how.

One of the blogs that I follow originates from the Colonial Williamsburg's Hay Shop, the period cabinetmakers shop in that wonderful town. Despite being set firmly in the eighteenth century, the workers there recently began a blog, where they write about the work that they do. And they are without doubt men after my own heart. One of the cabinetmakers there specializes in building spinet harpsichords , a trade that was necessary at the time and for that shop. He is working on a piece, but due to nagging tendinitis, is unable to work with tools, so has been reading up on the history of spinets.

In his post, he mentions having read a recent dissertation from the University of Edinburgh, a two volume brute, by Peter Geoffrey Mole which discusses (among other things, no doubt) construction methods of period instruments. Following that link, I kept myself to reading just the abstract of the work, but marveled at the index terms, among them Organology.

Further curiosity and tippity-tapping lead me from the Oxford English Dictionary through the Grove Dictionary of Music (both of these behind Ivory Tower pay walls, sadly) and of course Wikipedia to explain that this is the field of study of the history of musical instruments, and reminds me quite a bit of how the field of bibliography studies the history and "construction" of books, if you will.

Aren't connections super?

On Distraction

I don't know what it is lately, but when it comes to attending to tasks- even those I relish- I seem to be like a kid in the proverbial candy store.

OH! LOOK! SHINY!

An example: reading. I'm not at all a fast reader, but have diverse interests and a complete inability to follow any one of them through. Perhaps it's just my DNA. But I thought I'd give an example. To whit, the current pile. And this is just the in-my-office pile, as opposed to the in-the-dining-room pile or the on-the-nightstand pile.

Have you noticed the title of this blog? I'm fascinated by commonplace books, and David Allan's "Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England" investigates the phenomenon in Georgian England, and the effect it had on readers and reading. Looking forward to it!

Molly Berger's "Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology, and Urban Ambition in America, 1829-1929" is the next book to be featured on my podcast, so I'm GOING to read it. I'm going to enjoy reading it too. But this one, as must needs, will filter to the very top of the pile, very quickly, as the books for the podcast generally do.

I'm a closet (or out of the closet, more like it) clock and watch aficionado. And more specifically, mechanical clocks and watches. And I want to learn more about horology, so Eric Bruton's "Clocks and Watches: 1400-1900" is on the pile.

In keeping with the above-mentioned jones, David S. Landes' "Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World" takes a broader view of the topic, one I think I'll enjoy.

Language and linguistics savant David Crystal's "Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices" is a companion volume to an exhibition at the British Library that I am very sorry I did not see. As a language history junky, this book is like a sweet injection of the best stuff.

David Pye's "The Nature and Art of Workmanship" is a book that I return to often, and not just when looking for inspiration for my furniture building. I find what Pye says about workmanship can apply to many aspects of my life, from building cabinets to teaching library skills to baking pizza to being a father. From the second chapter:

If I must ascribe a meaning to the word craftsmanship, I shall say as a first approximation that it means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgment, dexterity and care with which the maker exercises as he works. The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making; and so I shall call this kind of workmanship "The workmanship of risk"... [which] we may contrast the workmanship of certainty, always to be found in quantity production, and found in its purse state in full automation.

Happy Christmas, part 1!

This is but part 1 of a Christmas post. We are extending the holiday in absolutely un-holy ways here in Cleveland. Daughters, parents and aunts arrive soon, so much of the celebrating (that is, present opening) will wait until we have critical mass. In the mean time, our core group of three have had a wonderful holiday so far.

I've enjoyed my annual read of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, something I've done for probably 30 years now. As we unpacked the box of Christmas books while we were decorating, my mother's copy of Delbert Lean's transcript of the version he would orate in Wooster every year (for over 50 years!) appeared. Lean was a professor of speech at Wooster for the first half of the last century. That was probably the first version I read as a young boy.

We also listened to Dylan Thomas reading A Child's Christmas in Wales, another tradition I've followed for years.

I'm also reading- for the first time- E.T.A. Hoffman's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. It is wild and fantastic! I'm reading Maurice Sendak's illustrated translation.

Christmas Eve we spent distracting Sam from his newly-erupting tooth. One thing we did was to try out his backpack. We loaded him up and walked up to the library to return some books. Despite his look of slight unease at being loaded into the contraption, he seemed to be awfully comfortable once we started walking- enough so to fall asleep!

Christmas dinner was roast duck. I followed Julia's recipe and it was delicious. Accompanying was maple bacon Brussels sprouts and a wild rice medley. (Christmas brekkers was Svenska pannkakor, lunch was leftover homemade pizza from Xmas eve!)

The tree and presents are being guarded carefully (though the guard does nap from time to time.)

Today we visited the Cleveland Museum of Art. Sam and I have seen the Treasures of Heaven exhibit several times, but Kim hadn't. We wandered some of the galleries, then saw the new exhibit of illuminated manuscripts, "The Glory of the Painted Page", from the permanent collection- really super! This one we'll come back to.

Our traveling guests are pinned down by snow on the east coast, but we hope to see them sometime late tomorrow. Stay tuned for Christmas, part 2!

The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book

I began this blog over a year ago to serve as a space for random thoughts, musings, and a space for sharing interesting thoughts and musings of others that I find as I read and study and listen. I chose the title Commonplace to evoke the tradition of thoughtful people in times past who might keep books in which they would copy interesting or thought provoking passages from whatever they happened to be reading, often with a few notes of their own. The resulting remixes surely represented new works of their own- mashups, pre-digital style.

So when I read this piece by Steven Berlin Johnson entitled The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book, I was delighted to see that Mr. Johnson goes one step further, saying in effect that the future of text has two potential paths in our networked world- the model of the glass box or the model of the commonplace book. It is an interesting piece- with some equally interesting observations about the current limitations of the nascent iPad and its iBook application as indicative of the "glass box". Johnson's point is that it is the ability to snip, cut, paste, connect, remix, mashup text that is the beautiful value of writing and of text, digital or not.

The image above is from a digital exhibition at the Library of Congress, and shows Walt Whitman's commonplace book.

Mending Wall

Kim and I are busy preparing the house for the imminent arrival of baby Gustave Flaubert Claspy and so this past weekend I was boxing up some books to store temporarily while we are shuffling the rooms in the house. One book I lingered over is an anthology of English and American literature that was given to my mother by the English department of her high school, John Marshall High here in Cleveland, for being their outstanding student. Tucked inside this volume were two pieces of paper, one a church bulletin from 1976 from my older sister Jane's confirmation service. The other was a small piece of folded note paper, punctuated by quite a few thumb-tack holes, with the first line of "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost, and what is surely the poet's signature in slightly faded blue fountain pen ink.

Frost told the audience that if they could write down from memory a line from one of his poems, he would autograph the paper for them. My mother had a wealth of poetry memorized, so this was surely no problem for her, and she went away with the poet's name inscribed below her handwriting, and clearly had affixed this piece of paper to many cork boards during her life.

I contacted Denise Monbarren, head of Special Collections at the College of Wooster's beautiful Andrews Library and asked if she could confirm the poet's reading at the college, and not only did she confirm that he spoke there in November of 1955 (my mother's junior year at Wooster), but also sent me a copy of the Wooster Alumni Bulletin of December 1955 with a report of the event. Many thanks to Denise!

Author and Book

A small-in-size but big-for-the-family package arrived in yesterday's mail from Rutgers University Press.

An actual copy of Kim's book!

Her editor says that the book is on its way to warehouses and should be in bookstores in the next six weeks.

Congratulations to Kim on her achievement!