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From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

“Handmade” does not mean “shoddy.” This latest episode of the David Pye mini-series tackles chapter 10 of The Nature and Art of Workmanship in which Pye takes John Ruskin to task for his sloppy reasoning about workmanship. Pye’s motivation in writing his book was to critique the “illegitimate extensions” of Ruskin’s ideas about art and pleasure in work. He believed that a more precise analysis would clear up this muddy thinking so that the crafts could be recovered and dignified once again. 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’” Issue Ten with Ruskin’s “Savageness ”...

But the principle may be stated more broadly still. I have confined the illustration of it to architecture, but I must not leave it as if true of architecture only. Hitherto I have used the words imperfect and perfect merely to distinguish between work grossly unskilful, and work executed with average precision and science; and I have been pleading that any degree of unskilfulness should be admitted, so only that the laborer’s mind had room for expression. But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

Let’s not let these tools go to waste. They’re workhorses with lots of good work left to do. We’ve already been getting great feedback about our latest course, Back to the Bench. I can tell this material was long overdue. -Joshua  

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

My first book, Hands Employed Aright, was a monograph about an eccentric New England minister/furniture maker named Jonathan Fisher. Harvard-trained, Fisher was, as one biographer put it, “a rural Jeffersonian polymath” who used the early morning fireplace light to study ancient Hebrew texts before setting out on a day filled with manual work or pastoral visitation. Fisher was an intellectual. He was obsessed with mathematics, he journaled extensively, he wrote sermons and self-published his own book (and even made his own woodcuts for it). But he also was a craftsman to his core. He built chairs and painted signs. He raised sheep and cattle. Fisher seemed to be endlessly fascinated with every aspect of the world. Reading his journals, one...

For everyone who loves to work wood by hand, who values beautiful old tools over shiny mass-produced modern ones, and who wants to clean up and use that old hand plane or saw but doesn’t know quite where to begin – we have a new video course for you. For the past several weeks, Joshua and I have been filming, editing, and getting our hands dirty here in the M&T shop. We’ve unpacked boxes of old tools and pored over them, looking at all kinds of details, repairs, and potential snags to putting them back to use at the bench. We’ve dug into thick, dusty library volumes and other old resources. And we’ve straightened bent saws, fixed broken planes, and sharpened...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch