Toolemera Blog

Book Review: Brimfield Rush

Brimfield Rush: The Thrill of Collecting and the Hunt for the Big Score. By Bob Wyss. ISBN:978-1-933212-52-4

The title speaks for itself, doesn't it? Quite a play on words if you think about it for a second. The Rush to the opening gate. The Rush of finding or selling stuff. The Rush of the Big Score. The Rush to the porta-potty after eating unknown fried things after a day in a boiling hot field.

This is one of those books that followed me around the library, insisting on being read. The author, Bob Wyss, is a Rhode Islander who has written  the definitive book on collecting, collectors, dealers and the institution that has become the Flea Markets at Brimfield. I don't know if another book has been written about Brimfield, so calling this the definitive work is a safe bet. Or a good deal. Possibly a sleeper.

Enough of the bad puns. I really enjoyed this book. It's not just about the history of how the Brimfield flea markets came about or where they are going, it's really about what drives collectors, dealers and collector/dealers. Wyss profiles a pair of collector/dealers whose ups and down must feel familiar to anyone who frequents flea markets, estate sales, auctions and the like. In addition, he profiles Joel, AKA "Cast-Iron Cookware? Anyone have Cast-Iron Cookware?" as a prime example of the Collector. The dealer-only types are covered as an adjunct to the role of the collector and collector/dealer in this sub-world of commerce. Throughout, the read is fun, fascinating, engrossing and a 'can't put it down 'till it's finished' book.

No deep philosophical musings on the meaning of collecting versus dealing. Wyss introduces his take on why and how people collect and sell stuff from the standpoint of the people profiled in the book. That's what makes the book so engaging. You can feel their experiences, their disappointments and their successes while learning about flea markets, small time and big time dealers and what drives the collector.

Get it from your library, from a bookstore, but just get a copy and read it. I haven't posted one of those Amazon links because I gave up on Amazon Associates, or whatever it's called today. Too much work for so little return.

Derek Cohen said I read too many books. Well, Derek... read this book and let me say "so there!" Brimfield is what you are missing way down in your neck of the woods. Reading is the only way you'll get to experience Brimfield, short of making a major trip topside.

Till next, Gary

Hide Glue - The Book You Gotta Have

Hide Glue: Historical & Practical Applications. By Stephen A. Shepherd. Well, Chris Schwarz may have beat me to the review, but I'll take sloppy seconds any day on a book such as this one.

Stephen Shepherd is author of the Full Chisel Blog, a blog that should be a must-read on the list of any woodworker, fan of early trades, artist, historian, furniture restorer or conservator, humorist, &c, &c. Why? Because Stephen is all of these.

Hidden behind those antiquarian spectacles of his is a serious student of the history of tools, trades and all things historical. If you really want to embarrass Stephen, search out his CV under Bio at The Old Website.

Now that I have exposed his studious past, let's talk, albeit briefly, about his new book on Hide Glue. I won't go into the details that Chris covered as I know that by now, you have read his post. In fact, if you hadn't read his post when it first was posted, your post reading skills are woefully inadequate. What with RSS feeds, email updates, bookmarks, Twitter and all that stuff, you really have to get with it!

Hide Glue is, and I will say it, the one book you should buy this year. Wait, never mind that. Please by my books too. Let's try this again. Hide Glue, by Stephen Shepherd is THE book on Hide Glue. Part introduction, part user instructions, part history and part What Makes Hide Glue Tick, this is the most accessible and comprehensive book or article that I have read on the subject.

Add to these praises a set of illustrations that are not to be missed. Let me say that I am not a fan of Graham Blackburn. I am a fan of Eric Sloane. Why? Because Sloane's sketches are live and Blackburn's are inanimate. Stephen's sketches are in the first category. You feel as if you are there, looking at the scene or item. I am sure I have caused Stephen further embarrassment, but that is the hard life of the author.

You can, and should, buy your copy of Hide Glue: Historical & Practical Applications at Tools For Working Wood, Joel Moskowitz' hangout. In addition, you really should add hide glue to your arsenal of adhesives.

Till next, Gary

Ohio & Indiana Tool Makers Books Back In Print

it's hard enough digging up information on the history of tool makers. Usually the answer you need is buried in some book, on some shelf and most likely you forgot where you put it. Or at least that is typically my problem. Even more problematic is that most independent researches into the history of tools and trades publish one edition and that is that. The initial print run is sold out and then it's off to Ebay or a tool auction in hopes of finding a copy at an affordable price.

Enter Jack Devitt. Who, you may or may not ask is Jack Devitt? To borrow a headline from Farm Land News, he's Just Plane Jack. Ain't it grand? Someone had the forethought to write up a great bit of background on Jack and post it on the web.

Jack is the author of two important books:

Ohio Toolmakers and Their Tools

Indiana Toolmakers and Their Tools.

The books are priced individually at a very reasonable $25.00 (USD, includes postage and handling) and both are available direct from Jack. His address is:

Jack Devitt
PO Box 116
Ottoville, OH. 45876.
email: devitt@bright.net

I have the Ohio Toolmakers book which I picked up at an auction, fearing it would not be back in print. The Indiana book is now on my list of things to buy.

Jack emailed me tonight to let me know he has just finished a 3rd printing. Yes, that's a 3rd printing. It's hard enough to sell a single print run of a special title, let alone three. That achievement alone tells you how useful these books are to anyone interested in the history of antique tools. You don't have to be a serious historian. You may just want to know when a particular maker was in business, what marks where used and where they worked. These books have just what you need.

I wanted to scan the cover for this post, but alas... I can't find it at the moment. But I promise you, I worked my way through the Ohio book and used it numerous times for reference. I think I know which box it is in, which is to say I really have to get my personal library organized. Storing books on shelves and in printer paper boxes in not a particularly good way of doing things. But...

You can never have too many books.

Send Jack an email and order a copy of each. Doing so will remind Jack of just how much we appreciate the work of the independent author.

Till next
Gary

The British - Dutch Plane Link?

Recently I picked Early Planemakers of London from my bookshelf for a re-read. Written by Don & Anne Wing and published in 2005, the book is sub-titled "Recent Discoveries in the Tallow Chandlers and the Joiners Companies". This book spoiled me. This is how books should be written. Particularly books that cover an historical subject. From the get-go, the authors state that this is a work in progress, that the material held within the volume is the result of their personal research and that, to the best of their ability, they are relating what they have discovered and will note what questions remain unanswered.

Upon reading, you'll find that the authors stick to their promises. At no time do they state as a fact what is or may be a guess, references to prior works are supplied throughout and new avenues of exploration are proposed with the intent of exciting the imagination of other researchers. This is clearly a work stemming from their personal passions as well as a work intended to spark interest in the history of wooden planes.

The authors have succeeded in taking what could have been a dry, scholarly work and turning it into a page-turner that introduces us to the peculiar and complex world of the British Trade Guilds of around 1680 through 1750. In particular, just how did plane-makers end up as members of the Tallow Chandlers Guild? How did this Guild relate to the Joiners Guild? What prompted apprentice plane-makers to enter the trade, or to leave it?

There are more leads, more open-ended questions and more suberb photographs in this book than can be tolerated. While reading this at work, I wanted to ditch my schedule and hurry home to check on my wooden plane collection. Was there some missing link in there? Some gem I hadn't realized was one?

A comment or two in Early Planemakers of London about the Dutch plane-makers connection intrigued me. British - Dutch trade flourished in the 17th Century. Consider that there are more documented 17th C Dutch planemakers than there are British, it would seem logical to assume that early British tradesmen and ironmongers bought planes and other tools from Dutch makers. There are a few early Dutch made planes in collections that show British characteristics, despite their Dutch origins. Even into the turn of the 20th Century, Dutch tool mongers offered designs of British, United States, French and Dutch origins. This trade catalog in my personal collection, Album Van Schaven En Gereedschappen: Rabots et Outils, Planes and Different Tools: Jos. Harm, Vijzelstraat , Amsterdam, c1900, seems made for an international market of craftsmen. Even this late, we have a Dutch firm offering a variety of tool styles, unlike the more regionally conservative British and US firms who tended to focus only on their own borders when it came to styles and designs.

I had to pull Four Centuries of Dutch Planes and Planemakers from my shelf and re-read that one too. It seems there is, in all liklihood, a direct connection between the early Dutch plane-makers and the British trade. There are similarities in designs... heels look the same although toes differ, wedges may or may not resemble each other, etc. The problem is, in both books there are hints but as of yet, no hard evidence has surfaced. Perhaps in some nearly forgotten archival box, on a shelf in a dimly lit British or Dutch Archives, there sits a toolmongers ledger or an invoice that sheds light on this question.

Or perhaps there is a wooden plane bearing the stamps of both Dutch and British makers/toolmongers? Next time you drool over your collection, take a look to see if there is a connection or two to this particular mystery.

Till next

Gary

The Moxon Saga

Some people have asked "Where in the World is Joseph Moxon?". Understandably so as I first set out to produce a new edition of Moxon's Mechanick Exercises nearly a year ago. Numerous technical hills had to be overcome, some basic book conservation tasks had to be revisited, some software was not up to snuff and a wide variety of family crises served to slow the entire process down.

Needless to say, handling and imaging a book from 1703 requires quite a bit of care, planning and holding-of-your-breath. This copy has an original 18th C binding, at least from what I can see. I have no desire to rebind it. Sure, most of the spine is missing, the covers have bits and pieces of leather chipped off and there are a few loose pages. But so what? This book is pretty much the way it came to the hands of the first owner. Lopsided pages due to poor binding abound, finger prints, the remains of a shoe heel imprint on the cover, personal annotations, creases, wrinkles and so on. All of which adds to the allure of holding and reading The Real Thing.

To achieve a truly flattened image, I would have to disbind the book, press and flatten each set of pages and image them individually. That could be done, but once again I'ld have to disbind it. After viewing the results of trials under magnification, I really didn't like the quality. So the book went into a book press and sat there for three months. I checked it every now and then and relegated it to the press for some more torture. Finally, the pages had flattened as much as they wanted to be. Some wrinkling from centuries of damp is evident, but that is what a really old book looks like. Just take some dramamine before reading it.

A funny thing happened on the way to scanning. I have used Lasersoft Imaging's Silverfast scanning software for years. The latest version seemed to lack something. Greyscale images lacked definition, contrast was muddy and the page texture seemed to disappear into a granular mess. Lots of tweaking but still not up to what I wanted. Photoshop Elements 4 (Mac) and Graphic Converter did good jobs of correcting the problems, but I really prefer to produce a scan at the scanner end that contains the best possible image before I start on image manipulation through a graphics program.

I've been using an Epson 4490 which really is a great scanner. But the software, while good, was not up to Silverfast for options. Until the latest release. There is an all important parameter set that I wanted to use: 300 dpi Greyscale, original size output. What's so important about this task? If you set the output for physical dimensions, most software will adjust the dpi to suit the height and width of the object. Why? Because dpi is really an indication of physical dimensions when scanning. The way to produce a higher quality scanned image is to force the dpi to meet the physical dimensions. The latest Epson scan software does that beautifully. The older version had these settings, but the output sometimes varied.

Then comes Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac. Sure, I have it on the PC too, but it's sort of slow and fussy. The batch functions are a breeze. Adjusting contrast became easy-peasie. Plust the output was a perfect reproduction of the original with suitably enhanced contrast to bring out text and the page texture.

Along the way to this stage, I finally realized that almost everyone who expressed interest in Moxon, as well as a variety of other titles (e.g.; Denning, Jones, Nicholson, Holtzappfel, etc), asked for a PDF of sufficient quality for printing off their home printer. That was the next glitch. Getting a PDF that is small enough for downloading yet contains sufficient quality for printing... of a 305 year old book... was a failure in the making. Let's step back a moment to discuss your typical reprint. What you see from the vast majority of reprints of classic books are actually recreations. The content has been re-typed, re-word processed or re-typeset, graphics have been properly placed for an end result that looks like the original, but is clear as a bell. Some companies do work from scanned or photographed images that have been carefully cleaned in imaging software. The end result is the same, a copy that looks like new.

I have this thing for old, stained, wrinkled, creased paper. I don't iron out the creases and wrinkles in billheads, I don't bleach out paper. I will gently erase modern smudges or remove loose surface dirt, press out particularly bad creases and mend tears that threaten the viability of a page but that is about it. A book may be pressed for a good many weeks to correct any one of a number of faults but I rarely rebind.

There is a form of reproducing incunabula (a book or page that was printed before 1501) that I like. The image, scanned or photographed, is reproduced as is, as you see it, in greyscale or color, typically with a fairly wide clear margin surrounding it. You know that you are looking at the original, warts and all. Maybe I can't afford to buy a copy, or even find a copy, but I can pretend I am reading the real thing. That is the goal of most of my reprints, PDF or hard copy.

Which brings us to the present. Over at work, we have been using a POD (Print On Demand) service to produce bound copies of lengthy reports. We have an in-house publications department, but in some cases we needed features only a full scale publishing house could provide. Aha! I've been investigating POD publishers for the past few months and find that in the past year, the quality and reliability of POD has improved considerably. What was a venture in it's infancy even a year ago is now a fully grown industry for the independant author or publisher.

And that is were I am at now. The current plan is to produce a series of books, beginning with Moxon, in paper. Hopefully there will be the option of trade paper back or hard cover, depending upon the readers preferences. I may offer a PDF version at a much lower price for those prefer a digital read. In general, prices will be kept reasonable and affordable. I'm in talks with a few POD publishers to see which best fits my requirements. In the meantime, I'm rescanning Moxon at press quality settings: higher dpi, high contrast text, background adjustment for legibility, etc. The whole will be formatted in a desk top publishing program, sent to the POD agency and, voila! Offered for sale in an eStore.

In summation, if it don't look good from the get-go, it ain't worth doin'.

Till next
Gary