Earlywood: No Furniture for Clones

Publisher’s note: Good morning and welcome to Earlywood, a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. This originally appeared in a blog post in 2020. Each Earlywood entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. We hope you enjoy it.

At Popular Woodworking, we begged readers to send us submissions for the magazine’s last-page essay called “End Grain.” The problem was that almost all the essays we received had the same theme. It was such a problem that the theme became its own compound adjective.

Me: So what’s the essay about?

Fellow editor: It’s another grandpa-was-a-woodworker-so-now-I-am-too piece.

To be fair, my grandfather on my mother’s side truly was an accomplished woodworker. He taught me quite a bit about the craft and inspired me to be a woodworker. So I am in the sizable coho…