Studley

A (well-deserved?) Delightful Diversion

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For a moment, think about that ten-page term paper you had to write in high school, agonizingly struggling to finish the assigned task.  Now multiply that ten-page paper by a factor of eighty-two, combined with transforming that much of some old French guy’s arcane verbiage into comprehensible English and you know what it is like to spend days on end working with Roubo.  It is not agonizing — to the great contrary – but it is grueling.

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Combine that with a bitterly cold winter (for these parts) and the ongoing chore of relocating after three decades in the same house without ever systematically winnowing the papers residing in multiple file cabinets and dozens of bookcases, and you get some idea why I rewarded myself this afternoon with a delightful diversion — formatting and massaging the manuscript for Virtuoso: the Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.  No less arduous than Roubo, but certainly a welcomed change of pace.

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For the sheer fun of it, I spent several hours creating the tool inventory for the cabinet, merging the notes I dictated to Chris during my examination of all the tools individually during our research and photographic forays with Narayan’s exquisite photographs.  Sometimes I just stopped to stare a the screen, to relive the moments past.  It was and is unbelievably cool.