Toolemera Blog

The Circle Of The Mechanical Arts

In between Moxon and Nicholson was Martin. Ok, there was Spons too but that was much later. And Holtzapffel of course. Well, there were quite a few. Quite a few authors who built upon Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (which book took from other authors of earlier dates of course. I suspect there was some stone age author who took from an earlier primate author). Thus goes the spread of knowledge.

Let us return to Mr. Martin. Thomas Martin authored two books, available in the usual quality from Google Books and scam publishers everywhere:

The Circle Of The Mechanical Arts

The Carpenter's And Joiner's Instructor In Geometrical Lines, The Strength Of Materials And Mechanical Principles Of Framed Work

 
Circle is 616 pages, 39 full page plates and comes in under the wire at 8x10.5 inches. This is one big book. Covering no less than 66 distinct chapters, Circle encompasses all you would ever need to know on The Mechanical Arts short of purchasing a multi-volume encyclopedia. As I understand it, The Carpenter's And Joiner's Instructor expanded upon three of Circle's topics, even offering a revolutionary proof of which I am not  yet conversant. Given my woeful skills in math, I suspect I will never be conversant in this proof. If you'd prefer a PDF of the title page and the table of contents, here 'tis: Download MartinCircle1813

Rethinking Mechanick Exercises

It's 7:48 AM, I've been awake since 5 AM due to a knee that must belong to someone else. It can't be mine and if it is, what did I do to offend it? Oh Woe! Oh Percoset!

Enough of the drama. Besides, Phinney (the 5 month old coon kitten) is trying to chew on my finger. I'm awake, sort of.

When I should have been finishing up Nicholson's Mechanic's Companion, I found myself mulling over the jacket text for the hard cover version of Moxon's Mechanick's Exercises. A difficult task indeed as Ella (the 7 month old coon kitten) is batting at the back of my t-shirt through a gap in my office chair. Rest assured, in just about 11 months all the kittens in the house will be bona fide cats. Maine Coon Cats you see, take a bit longer to fully mature than do your average cat.

Back to Mr. Moxon. After reading most everything I can dig up on Moxon, his contemporaries and his social milieu (I so very rarely get to use that word. It does make me feel oh so very polished), I have come to the conclusion that he was not who we seem to think he was.

Who Invented The First Workbench?

I've been watching a lot of NatGeo specials on whales and elephants. I have come to the determination that they are more intelligent than homo sapiens. True, they are fairly endangered for survival, but think about it... do either species worry about global warming? Do either species build houses on the waterfront and then complain of the cruelties of Fate when the house is washed away? Didn't elephants high-tail it inland when the tsunami struck? Didn't Bob Barker do the right thing when he donated $5 million to the Sea Shepherds to aid in their fight to end the depredation of whales by a commercial fishing fleet masquerading as a government sponsored scientific research expedition?

Which brings me to the current brou-ha-ha over workbenches, Moxon, Felibien et. al. Mr. Full Chisel has  joined the fray.  Mr. Plimoth has continued to fray away at the discussion. And I have enjoyed snapping at people's heels as the discussion continues.

Once again, I am 'borrowing' a quote, now anonymous, from a recent email exchange:

"I agree with your description of the technique of re-engraving through a page of another print. Perhaps more interesting than the plow, is Moxon’s workbench. The workbench itself is a careful reversal. The  bench fitments are independently engraved. The bench hook is correctly located on the left end of the bench. A single bench screw is added on the left end of the bench. Felibien has none. Felibien’s lengthy double bench screw (Plate XXX G) is moved from behind the bench, shortened and somehow attached to he bench’s right front edge. The hold fast and mallet are reversed. The mallet was shortened to make way for the well traveled double bench screw. The double bench screw seems rather awkward on the right hand end of the bench. All this amounts to quite a bit of copying and new engraving in one print."

From The Horse's Mouth: Moxon On Workbenches

There is an ongoing thread of sorts within the blogosphere, a term I really despise. Blogosphere? What in all tarnation is a blogosphere? Is is spherical? Does that mean that I can see it? Is it a figment of Isaac Newton's imagination? How can we participate in something that sounds like the first cousin to The Blob and third cousin, once removed, to The Thing? And I'm not even getting to The Crawling Eye or The Night Of The Lepus...

Anyhow, the ongoing discussion centers on workbenches and Joseph Moxon's interpretation of a workbench from his Mechanick Exercises. You'll notice I got that little commercial link out of the way right quick! The discussion has most recently spread across Chris Schwarz blog not once but twice in the past week. Peter Follansbee has joined the fray in presenting his thoughts and questions on the depictions of workbenches in very early manuscripts.

These discussions have covered the use of and positioning of the bench screw, clamping devices, bench vises, the bench top overhang, should modern benches have letters carved into them as depicted in Moxon, Felibien et al in order to achieve historical accuracy and so on.

I have my own opinions on the use of and veracity of early engravings, to wit: take them with a barrel of salt, preferably sea salt as it's supposed to be better for you. Unless you need iodine in your diet. Anyway, back to the topic. Unless we know for certain that a given engraving, line drawing or picture was done by the author, we can't base all of our assumptions upon what in all likelihood was the product of a journeyman or even apprentice working under the direction of the master engraver. The engraver may very well have worked from a previous engraving as done by some former artist, author or publisher. Then there is the whole perspective boondogle. There rarely, if ever, was perspective attended to in early engravings. Even in some 19th C engravings the entire idea of perspective was ignored in favor of The Flat Earth Society. Although some engravers were clearly proponents of The Disc World theory of tectonics.

If we can find some textual content to support or describe the workbench, then we have something to work with. My 17th C French is not up to par. I can swear a bit in French, Spanish, Yiddish and Cantonese and that is the full extent of my foreign language skillsets. Luckily for us, Joseph Moxon liked to make known his opinions on everything from printing to guilds to mathematics to oceans to the penny-pinching ways of his customers.

I present to you pages 64 and 65 of Mechanick Exercises: or The Doctrine of Handy-Works, being those pages pertaining to the make and use of the Workbench

  Moxon is fairly loosey-goosey when it comes to his description of what a workbench should be. Apparently, rather than take the rather rigid approach, he simply stated would a workbench could be, the various gadgets which could be added to one and wrote:

"Sometimes a double Screw is fixed to the fide of the Bench, as at 8; or fometimes its farther Cheek is laid on edge upon the flat of the Bench, and faftoned with an Hold-faft, or, fometimes, two on the Bench."

When Bookbinders Couldn't Spell

First and foremost, this is not a negative post regarding the individual or cumulative intelligence of bookbinders. Not in the least. Some time ago Stephen Shepherd asked me "why is there a leading word at the bottom of the pages of most early books?". Or words to that effect. 

You can see the example here from this page from Mechanic Exercises. "May" appears in the lower right hand corner of the text block. I've pondered this question for the past few months. The question kept me up late. I couldn't sleep for wont of a reasonable answer. I surmised this was a hold over from religious literature. It was my guess that the average 17th Century church goer couldn't keep track of a passage from one page to the next. Or perhaps the individual reading the passage needed a prompt before turning the page.

The same line of thought brought me to consider the possibility that the average reader had such a pitiful intellect that a memory crutch was needed lest the reader forget where he/she was in the book. I finally remembered what I had meant to do for a long time. Email Wesley Tanner, who knows a whole lot more about this stuff than I do.

Wesley cleared the air on this most important of matters.

"That's a pretty straightforward question. Early bookbinders were often Illiterate. The catchword was a guide to assembling books in the correct order. Even if a workman couldn't read, they could match the letters. This practice went back to the medieval period and lasted in manuscript practice well into the early part of the nineteenth century."

No hidden meanings from the tomes of the Rosecrucians. No magical import in the leading word of the following page. Just your average illiterate hard at work.

The other question that has long used up what remains of my brain cells has to do with the long 's'. I've read quite a bit about it. Thanks once again to Wesley, I've been turned on (if the phrase 'turned on' can be allocated to such a topic) to Typefoundry, a most interesting blog about... type. For the best answer to they why's and wherefore's of the long 's', read Typefoundry: Long S.

Till next, Gary