New and Upcoming Books
If there’s one thing to be said about woodworkers, it’s that we’re old school. In this day and age where the world has gone digital, here we are. We still craft with our hands. We enjoy tactile goods. Heck, we like picking up a book (or a magazine) and reading it. It’s with that in mind that I’m thankful for the community of master woodworkers that enjoys sharing their knowledge with us. They put forth a great effort to put some of their knowledge down into the pages of a book, to share with all. Here is a small sample of two new books coming out from two such woodworkers, and I think you will enjoy the books as much as I did.
THE WISDOM OF OUR HANDS
Finding Pleasure with Friends
Excerpt from Chapter 6
A guide to living fully and humanely by learning the wisdom of authentic manual work.
Author: Doug Stowe
Publisher: Linden Publishing
Release Date: March 22, 2022
Price: $16.99
The people who commission work from craftsmen when they have so many choices to do otherwise are very special. There have been many times when I’ve been asked by someone to make something they’d not seen before and that I’d not made before, yet they’ve approached me with faith that I would deliver something to enrich their home and their lives… all while they could have instead gone to a furniture store and had something delivered to do the same thing in the same day. I can tell you exactly what it means to the growth of an individual craftsman to have such faith placed in him or her, and through that to find a meaningful life. The implications on a personal level are enormous. Later, I’ll discuss what meaning that kind of relationship has within communities and within human culture.
Earlier in the book, I mention that trees have their own stories to tell–where there’s a knot there had been a branch and all that. What is our story to tell? Years ago, I attended an opening at a museum in which an artist gave a brief lecture on her work. I had walked through the exhibit before the lecture, trying to make sense of her creations. After her description of process and her motives for creating them, she asked us if the words about her work help any of us to make sense of what we’ve seen. And, of course, that was the case.
If you were writing a novel, would you first develop a plot line that would help you keep on course and that, you would hope, your readers could follow? If you think of
