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I happened again across Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Village Blacksmith” recently and took my time reading through it. Longfellow was from Maine (it was part of Massachusetts at the time, but we try to forget about that unfortunate era) and was familiar with the sights and sounds of the Portland waterfront and the shops of the tradesmen that lined the streets. His travels around the world gave him plenty to draw on for poetic inspiration, but he mostly returned to the stories and scenes of his beloved New England in his writing. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1868. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. I find this poem compelling. Not because it’s a lofty hagiography of some imaginary hero figure (it isn’t), not because...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

There is a valuable lesson in this for today’s woodworkers: We need to be careful about where we derive our standards of “good” work and sense of appropriate tolerances. Sometimes this means separating truth from myth. We need to recognize that modern dogma about engineer-like precision and glass-smooth secondary surfaces is an anomaly in the history of craft. As these photographs reveal, tear-out, knots, and coarse plane tracks are normal characteristics of hand work throughout history. It’s not sloppy or slipshod. It’s normal – even for the Shakers who aimed for perfection in all their efforts. As Brother Arnold explained to us, dealers and curators have developed a mythology around Shaker furniture in order to market these objects at art...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

In this final episode of their tour through David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Joshua and Mike bring up several of their critiques of Pye’s thought. As helpful and insightful as he was, the guys both are left feeling like something was missing. See how this book comes up short of a full-orbed, holistic discussion of workmanship and it’s enduring value in a technological age. SHOW NOTES  Order your copy of the book here: The Nature and Art of Workmanship Joshua Klein’s article in Issue Seven: ”A Fresh & Unexpected Beauty: Understanding David Pye’s ‘Workmanship of Risk’”