Chapter 4:2 1921-1930 : Woodworker Magazines and Manuals
In 1920s, Woodworker's Manuals Focused on Hand Tools:But, in a departure from this norm among woodworker's manuals of the 1920s decade,
his 1924 woodworker's manual, Woodworking:
A Handbook for Beginners in Home and School, Treating
of Tools and Operations. Charles G
Wheeler includes a lengthy
chapter dedicated to stationary power tools.
I mention this only
because most other manuals of that decade concentrated upon hand tools,
particularly if these manual authors saw amateur woodworkers as the
primary audience. As evidence, check the 1927 woodworker's manual
published by the Stanley Rule and Level Plant: How to Work With Tools and
Wood: For the Home Workshop. This manual
is replete with numerous photos that show a professional man
-- we know this because he is always dressed in suit vest, white shirt
and tie -- in his basement shop, full of hand tools, but no
power tools visible --
engaged in several settings: helping a son with a
project; being
praised by his wife for a just-completed project -- but,
again, no
sign of power tools. (Document 47 reprints Chapter 4, "This Will be a
Bench" and many of the over 30 illustrations.)
Here are a few of the documents I have uploaded on electrification, fractional horse power motors and the development of power tools. But also check Chapter 4.5
Writers woodworker's manuals of the era of rapid electrification, the market of fractional horse-power electric motors, then, were slow to pick up on the rapid shift by amateur from hand to power tools in the 1920s.
If you check Chapter 4.5, on technological development of power woodworking tools, you soon discover why I claim a disconnect.
Amatuer woodworkers were quick to adopt the power tools, scaled to the homeworkshop, rapidly coming into the market. We know this because, as reported in the volume 1, number issue of Popular Homecraft, in 1930, a survey of the nation yielded the fact that over 77,000 homes claimed home-shops with power tools. In his 1924 woodworker's manual, Charles G. Wheeler, a prominent industrial arts teacher and a ranking official in Boy Scouts of America, introduces his readers to numerous stationary power tools, most of which are too hefty to consider for home workshops.
Document 41: Popular Homecraft volume 1, number 1, 1930 "The Growing Popularity of Homecraft Workshops"
Moreover,
interestingly, Wheeler
includes an entry in his index for "router" -- pages 333-334 -- but on
those pages of his book he discusses shapers only. Why do I find this
incident puzzling? Today, we can create indexes of books -- using the
digitized manuscript of a book or article -- with Microsoft
Word XP. In 1924, using the book's galleys, I can visualize
Wheeler, pencil in hand, dutifully indexing away, for several months,
laboriously citing all the items on each page he thought
would interest readers. (Without the needed background
knowledge, I imagine that creating an index with an old maual
typewriter would have been, quite simply, nightmare! ) Knowing from
experience the perfidy of publishers, I think, maybe, that
Wheeler's section on "production routers" was eliminated,
while the book was in production, but the index entry was not
removed. This is a pity, because we could see first hand what Wheeler
intended when he discussed the production router for the amateur
woodworker.
(Several years later, in 1929, the J D Wallace 47
lb high-speed shaper came out on the market.)
The image on the left is interesting because of the coincidence of the 1929 appearance of the product on the market
Charles Hayward's First Woodworker's Manual
A very youthful charles Harold Hayward -- born in 1898, and claiming to be a London-based "self-employed carpenter" -- published his first book of interest to woodworkers in 1924: English Furniture at a Glance. Between the early 1920s and the 1970s, Hayward would go on to publish over 30 woodworker's manuals and edit at least two magazines dedicated to woodworking, a feat that makes him a strong competitor with Paul Hasluck and R J Decristoforo as the most prolific writer of books and articles for woodwrkers in the 20th century. The link for English Furniture at a Glance leads to a pdf for the book's title page, some prefatory material, and the chapters on benches and chairs.Total Corpus of Woodworker's Manuals for the Decade
Click here for a table that shows how many woodworker's manuals were published in America, decade by decade, in the 20th century. These figures come from data I downloaded out of bibliographic records maintained by the Worldcat database service. My examination of many -- but not nearly all -- of the reputed 282 woodworker's manuals published between 1921 and 1930 show that writers of these manuals concentrated on hand work, especially when these manuals targeted young woodworkers.(See also Appendix 4, A Century of Woodworking Manuals.)
