Woodworking Books & Magazines
As an admirer of hand-crafted woodwork, I'm an avid reader of old woodworking books and magazines. One of my favourites are the annual collections of "The Woodworker" published by Evans Brothers.
History of "The Woodworker"
As near as I can make out, the following is the early publishing history of "The Woodworker".
| Vol | Title | Subtitle | Date | Editor/Publisher |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | The Woodworker | A Practical Journal of Woodworking in all its Branches | Oct 1901 - Sep 1902 | Percival Marshall |
| II | The Woodworker | A Practical Journal of Woodworking in all its Branches | Oct 1902 - Mar 1903 | Percival Marshall |
| III | The Woodworker | A Practical Journal of Woodworking in all its Branches | Apr 1903 - Sep 1903 | |
| IV | The Woodworker | A Practical Journal of Woodworking in all its Branches | Oct 1903 - Mar 1904 | Percival Marshall |
| V | The Woodworker | A Practical Journal of Woodworking in all its Branches | Apr 1904 - Sep 1904 | Percival Marshall |
| VI | The Woodworker | A Practical Journal of Woodworking in all its Branches | Oct 1904 - Mar 1905 | Percival Marshall |
| VII | The Woodworker and Art Metal Worker | A Practical Journal of Woodwork, Art Metal Work, and the Allied Crafts | Apr 1905 - Sep 1905 | Percival Marshall/Percival Marshall |
| VIII | The Woodworker and Art Metal Worker | A Practical Journal of Woodwork, Art Metal Work, and the Allied Crafts | Oct 1905 - Sep 1906 | Walter C. Runciman |
| IX | The Woodworker and Art Metal Worker and Allied Crafts Journal | A Practical Journal of Woodwork, Art Metal Work, and the Allied Crafts | Oct 1906 - Sep 1907 | Walter C. Runciman |
| X | ||||
| XI | The Woodworker and Allied Crafts Journal | Oct 1908 - Mar 1909 | ||
| XII | ||||
| XIII | ||||
| XIV | ||||
| XV | ||||
| XVI | ||||
| XVII | ||||
| XVIII | ||||
| XIX | The Woodworker and Art Craftsman | None | Jan 1915 - Dec 1915 | Evans Bros. |
| XX | The Woodworker and Art Craftsman | None | Jan 1916 - Dec 1916 | Evans Bros. |
| XXI | The Woodworker and Art Craftsman | None | Jan 1917 - Dec 1917 | Evans Bros. |
| XXII | The Woodworker and Art Craftsman | None | Jan 1918 - Dec 1918 | Evans Bros. |
- The Woodworker and Art Metal Worker and Allied Crafts Journal, 1906-1908, Percival Marshall
- The Woodworker and Allied Crafts Journal, 1908-1910, Percival Marshall
- The Woodworker and Art Craftsman, 1910-1919, Odhams or Evans Brothers (1921-)
- The Woodworker, 1921-, Evans Brothers
2/3,5,8(i),8/9,14(o),15,17-18,22,24,26-28,34-46,51,53-54(i),55-64,66,77
One of my favourite columns, of course, is "Chips from the Chisel". Here's a sample from 1953 and 1954:
- The Way the Wind Blows (PDF), Sept 1953
- A Two-Footed Business (PDF), Jan 1954
- A Door Opens (PDF), Feb 1954
- On Being Rich (PDF), May 1954
- The Secret (PDF), July 1954
Each of the pages were individually scanned, white balanced, desaturated and then converted to PDF using the convert program that comes with ImageMagick. The advantage of conversion to PDF is so that web search engines can OCR them and make them searcheable. I'm currently researching how to to this myself, using tools available on Linux. For those interested, the convert utility is really easy to use, just list the images you want converted and the PDF file you want to create:
> convert chips_195402_1.jpg chips_195402_2.jpg chips_195402.pdf
Links
- ImageMagick
- Leptonica, an image processing library
- Tesseract, an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool
- Bookbase search
