Bibliography
Design
- The Unknown Craftsman, a Japanese Insight into Beauty, Soetsu Yanagi. Explodes my head every time I read it - discusses the beauty and importance of wear (patina), modern vs. traditional approaches to beauty, craft, and the longevity of objects, and much else.
Free Magazines
- SHELTER. “Building a future for Distributors and Dealers of Building Products”. Useful; it has good advertisments, and great information about new building products.
- Woodshop News. Every magazine has at least one profile of a small shop, including their business practices. Also covers some techniques and products. I love this magazine.
- CabinetMaker. About medium sized commercial shops and production. Lots of good information, business profiles, and they did a brilliant survey article on pricing jobs.
- Wood Digest. Focused on larger shops, corporate installations, cell based manufacturing, automation, tooling, and larger volume shop profiles. Lots of propaganda, but some good information, too.
- Finishing published by wood digest. So-so, but some good adverts from finishing suppliers.
- Closets. Hardware, installation techniques, business practices, organizers. I don’t find much here that interests me - lots of word in MDF and other panel products. Looks like high quality, low volume stuff.
- US Glass metal & glazing. Trade publication for the glass manufacturing business. It’s a good way to learn about the vocabulary of glass manufactures, and how much can be done with modern windows (fenestration, if you like big words). But it’s addressed to window manufacturers, and if you’re reading this, you’re not one. Worth looking at, but a year’s worth gets pretty old.
- DWM. “Door and window manufacturer magazine”. Not very useful unless you really ARE a window manufacturer. The advertisments are for window manufacturing equipment. Many articles discuss fenstration market trends. Wow, I got to use “fenstration” in a sentance!
Furniture Books
- Edward Barnsley and his Workshop - Arts and Crafts in the Twentieth Century. He does beautiful work. You can see some of it reproduced in this book, but it’s really sparing with photographs. There are more in
- Edward Barnsley, sixty years of furniture design and cabinet making. It’s made of pure unobtainium, so I have reproduced it here. I attemped to get permission from the foundation, but I haven’t heard back.
Architecture books
- Home: A short history of an idea, Witold Rybczynski. The evolution of how we live, and some (fairly cutting) insights into modern design and architecture.