Back At It (Roubo)

After a hiatus Michele and I are back at the Roubo grindstone.  We are now looking forward to two or three or four years of near-constant work.   Notwithstanding any reservations, we are determined to bring our final three sections of this monumental project to conclusion.  Admittedly, if the ongoing social and political exploration of the boundaries of decadence brings about the ultimate collapse of Western Civilization, and the interwebz with it, that could be a serious glitch.  As long as we can communicate easily between locations in the Virginia mountains, northern Vermont, and southern France, we will charge ahead.

In the aggregate, these three final sections — interior carpentry (windows, doors, stairs and floors); garden carpentry (surprising amounts on discussion of carving and design principles); and carriages (perhaps the coolest content of the whole encyclopedia) — are roughly 20% larger than Roubo on Marquetry and Roubo on Furniture combined.  LAP has indicated they want the whole pile all at once, so we are about to go “radio silent” for this portion of our working lives.  I expect to post approximately zero times over the next couple years on this project.

At the moment my task is to photograph the text pages from my Leonce Laget facsimile set, then to crop and reformat those pages before sending them along to Michele to work from.  At that point our well-established process will play out.

1.  text page images to Michele
2. rough first draft translation back to Don for heavy editing and workshop-friendly annotations and ancillary content
3. round-robin between Michele and Don until we are both satisfied with the completed draft
4. completed draft translation and text page images sent off to Philippe (note to self, contact Philippe; he is now living back in France)
5. send “final” draft to LAP, to begin the round robin with them.

Unless there is a compelling reason, there is no need for me to blog any more about this until we are much nearer the finish line.