Recently I was contacted by JoeM about his newly acquired vintage Studley-era piano maker’s workbench. His own eloquence suffices to tell the tale, although I edited it a touch for privacy and continuity and to format it since he wrote me multiple long missives on a (non-smart) cell phone.
I have found a piano makers work bench from Boston 1866. It has the wheel vices, is 33 by 77 inches. The vice was shimmed with the makers committee member cards, from the Boston city council.
I also found a memo from Hallet and Davis 1891 setting the rates of pay for the piano makers. It has six drawers and three smaller drawers inside, which are covered by a pull down front. It has all the dogs.
The end vice has a dog that passes through and slides.
It also has a hidden pull cord that locks the drawers by a cool mechanism in back.
Anyway, I’m a carpenter who was lucky enough to find this bench in the cellar of a home in Springfield Ma. I traded the bench for a 400 dollar job at the house. I quickly called my friend who is an antique tool collector and described the bench. He offered me 1000 dollars with out seeing it. He finally told me what it was, and said hes only seen two such benches in 50 years of collecting!
So the lady I traded for said it was her grandfathers, born in 1859. She said it had been in a few businesses around Springfield,one being Hampden Brewery, before it was returned to her, I really don’t want to ask her any more about the history in case this thing is valuable and wants it back. Right now the bench is in my living room where I study it. I seem to find something new each day.
I’m glad I read your article of furniture conservation as I started doing minor repairs. I glued a few cracks on the back side, but now will wait till further investigation. I did not know what a science it was.
One vise was attached to the bench and one was on the floor. Strangely the one on the floor was fine, the one on the bench was repaired. Some one must have dropped it. The vice face was snapped off and welded on, and get this BACKWARDS !! So the big Question is do I get it repaired? My best friend is the best machinist I’ve ever seen. He does incredible things with steel.
The two bottom drawers have different pulls than the top five.They don’t look original to me, and they have been painted gold.
Back to the history, the cards shimming the vise (had to take it off to move it) were in remarkable condition. The name I traced was Jairus A Frost. He had two different street addresses on two different cards, suggesting the passage of time pointing to him as owner. Some where in the Boston records I found his occupation listed as piano maker. A friend of mine found an article in a news paper that said he was in the Boston Benefit Society. The cards say Committee of Relief, address 38 Porter St and 484 Washington St, Boston. One card lists him as vice-president January 1866 to 1877. There must be more info on Jairus, I mean I found this info with my meager computer skills.
Note: I laid my Sabilla level corner to corner and it is dead flat at 162 years old.
My wife hopes the bench is worth a ton, but I don’t, I want to keep it if I can. Will send pics as soon as I can get my daughter to do it.
Joe and I spoke on the phone for a good, long time, and it was a delight on many levels. I gave him some advice on the care and restoration of it, and the last time I heard from him he was going to keep it.
Throughout L’art du Menuisier Roubo illustrates some pretty snazzy furniture. Print 261, “Plans and Elevations of a Closed Desk,” certainly fits that description. If I recall the accompanying text correctly, this desk is designed for the use of four (or maybe even six) people. All of them sitting side by side in an un-air conditioned Parisian office (it is worth noting that the word “bureaucracy” is a French word) scratching out stacks of paperwork ad nauseam and ad infinitum. Ahh, cubicle life at its very best.
The print is in excellent condition, and was both drawn and the copper plate engraved by Roubo himself.
If you have ever wanted to own a genuine piece of Rouboiana, this is your chance. I will be selling this print at Handworks on a first-come basis, with terms being cash, check, or Paypal if you have a smart phone and can do that at the time of the transaction.
Many years ago, and for many years, I used to host a monthly lunch meeting of like-minded observers of things economic, political, and philosophical, for a no-holds-barred off the record 90 minutes of spirited discussion over scrumptious food. The crew was heavily weighted towards minarchist thinkers, mostly of the Hayekian economist model. One of my stalwart participants was MarkM, who for decades was a policy analyst for international brokerage firms, and one of the most insightful men I have ever met. To this day, and I still receive his weekly newsletter, if he says something I pay very close attention.
At one point (1990?) he was musing about the coming schisms and reorganization of the culture, eventually breaking apart and reforming into what he called “gated communities of interest.” In his thesis, people would use the internet and other vehicles to find fellow travelers for whatever the interest in question was, and these new virtual communities would in great part supersede our physical neighborhoods. Notwithstanding this was more than a quarter century ago, as I live in the least populous county east of the Mississippi I find his words to have been prescient.
I’ve been thinking about Mark’s comments recently as I reflect on my circle of correspondence, spanning multiple topics and including many people I have never met in person. In some cases the interactions do develop a physical manifestation as we “strangers” send items to each other.
Recently one of my correspondents demonstrated a profound understanding of both me and my philosophical heritage when this item arrived in the mail from him. I cannot say I was truly surprised at one level, as our emails have revealed that he has a better understanding of US history and perspectives than almost any US citizens, despite the fact that this man has never set foot on our soil (although I am encouraging him to emigrate to the Virginia Highlands). Further, I already knew him to be immensely talented and highly skilled, and this panel of copper punch-work bears that out.
With that, I give you the new and treasured accouterment for my shop, and the honored location for this artwork in The Barn. Every time I gaze out on the mountains, which is pretty often, my eye is taken to this symbol of my own political inclinations.
And I think of a friend I have never met in person, an esteemed citizen of my own Virtual Community.
One of the hallmarks of Roubo’s images in L’art du Menuisier was a series of preposterously intricate elevations and schematics for complex pieces of furniture. Both the article of furntiure and its representation are works of art. Such is certainly the case with Plate 260, “Diagrams and Elevations of a Desk With Its Developments.”
Overall the print is in excellent condition, with there being one small crease in one corner and some of the usual oxidation discoloration at the perimeter of the page.
The original illustration and the plate engraving were done by Roubo himself.
If you have ever wanted to own a genuine piece of Rouboiana, this is your chance. I will be selling this print at Handworks on a first-come basis, with terms being cash, check, or Paypal if you have a smart phone and can do that at the time of the transaction.
I snuck in a couple hours the other day to flatten the undersides of the two bench top slabs with a foreplane (a #5 with a cambered iron) and fit the legs. The strategy of fabricating the top slabs in halves and surfacing them with the power planer is definitely a winner. I already knew how successful the “David Barron” practice was for the lamination approach.
At this point I am just shy of 20 hours for the two benches. In a couple days I will flatten and trim the tops and drill the holdfast holes and call them done. Temporarily, as I need to install the leg vise and shelf for the one I am donating to the Library of Congress rare book conservation posse. But for demo tables at Handworks, this is as good as I will get.
Continuing Roubo’s theme of indolent leisure we have Plate 259, “Other Sorts of Game Tables with Their Illustrations” from a First Edition of L’art du Menuisier. The image is a delightful assemblage of precise detailed representations of a variety of tables employed in activities dedicated to killing time and presumably transferring money from one person to another. Perhaps most charming about this page is that there are some tiny creases in the paper from the original casting of the hand-made paper. I find such features delightful, and overall the page is in most excellent condition, one of the best among the prints I have for sale.
The plate was drawn and engraved by Roubo himself.
If you have ever wanted to own a genuine piece of Rouboiana, this is your chance. I will be selling this print at Handworks on a first-come basis, with terms being cash, check, or Paypal if you have a smart phone and can do that at the time of the transaction.
My long time friend and colleague Cor(nelis) van Horne had a project that justified his making a ripple molding machine himself. I think the project involved making several full sized room doors with basketweave ripple molding somewhere in the design. Recently Cor retired and moved back to his native Holland, and gifted the machine to Winterthur Museum with the condition that it be used for educational programming. Chief Furniture Conservator Mark Anderson contacted me with the offer to use it in the upcoming Ripple Molding Machine workshop and I accepted. One of the things we will be doing during the gathering in two weeks will be to get the machine fully assembled and tuned up so that we can crank out some molding for everyone to go home with.
I spent a half hour putting the legs back on and some other minor assembling, mostly to get all the pieces together and out of my way.
Here is a picture of a frame Cor made with some of the moldings he made with this machine.
One of the peculiarities to me of the Roubo encyclical on furniture making L’art du menuisier was his attention devoted to gaming and game tables. Perhaps the Parisians were as debauched as we are today, only they didn’t have internet gambling and office sports betting pools. And speaking of “pool” the games of billiards were numerous and complex, far surpassing the pocket billiards (pool) that I am familiar with from movies and the Student Union in college.
Plate 256, “A Continuation of Description of a billiard table and the Instruments that are Necessary to this Game” is a peek into the arcane world of billiards, which is a series of games of precision bumper ricocheting on sometimes huge playing tables. Plate 256 presents a world so foreign to me that the devices represented are completely unknown (to me). So if you know of billiard enthusiast who wants a bit of original First Edition Rouboiana this is your chance.
This page is in near-excellent condition with a little more border staining than most of the ones I have, but the image field is in darned near perfect condition. The staining would be completely hidden by the mat when you get it framed.
The plate was drawn and engraved by Roubo himself.
I will be selling this print at Handworks on a first-come basis, with terms being cash, check, or Paypal if you have a smart phone and can do that at the time of the transaction.
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