Old & New Tools for Woodworking Research

Here be rabbet holes.

People ask us all the time where we find the historical texts and images that are the backbone of our books and blogs. Like there's a website called secretwood.com (please don't actually click that), which is filled with all the cool old texts. Just pick one of them and be amazed.

The truth is that the way I research old texts isn't much different than when I was in college. It goes like this. Find a book that has a similar topic to what you are researching. Read it. Make note of the books that the author cites, both in the text and the book's bibliography.

Check out those books. Repeat until you hit pay dirt. Woodworking is a small enough topic that you'll find authors tend to use the same sources as other authors. What becomes gold is when you find an outlier – a book that rarely gets cited but seems interesting.

"De l'Exploitation des Bois" by M. Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1700-1782). Holy snail balls! This might be the first book on green woodworking. Perhaps the first book that discusses in detail how wood shrinks as it dries.

And that's how new projects get launched.

But crap, this book is in French. So now what?

In the olden days, back in the Year of Our Lord 2006, you needed to hire a translator to help you decipher the text, or you needed to learn the language. Most computer-based translators were crap at the time. Basically, Old French went in; Garbage Semi-English came out.

Since then, things have gotten better. And Google Translate, a free app for your phone, does a pretty good job. You just take a photo of the page, and it translates it for you. Google Translate is by no means perfect, but you can get the gist of most texts with ease. And you can use context and the images to get you almost all the way home.

That's how I am translating "Ácsolt ládák titkai" by Gyenes Tamás, a modern Hungarian book about the carved chests and coffers that occupy Tamás's life.

The mechanical part of the process is ridiculously easy.

1.     Take a photo of a page of text while using the Google Translate app.
2.     Press a button to make the translation.
3.     Press a button to copy the translated text.
4.     Paste it into a word processing document.

After that I go over each page and look for problems, usually extra letters or words that got inserted into the translation because of the way that Google Translate interpreted the images on the page and/or the captions for the images.

Then it's back to reading, reading, reading. Making notes of the sources cited. Finding those sources.

Researching Images

Technology has made finding historical woodworking images easier than ever. Many libraries and museums had digitized parts of their collection. The only problem is language.

Here's an example of the problem. Several months ago I mentioned that I had a French apron hook in the shape of an old workbench. And I showed a photo of the little bugger on my blog.

Some readers went nuts and started looking for them online but came up empty. Why? Language.

Searching for "French apron hook" won't turn up much that is useful. But if you look for "crochet de tablier" on French eBay, you will turn up dozens of hits. "Crochet de tablier menuisier" will get you even closer.

Figure out what the key words are in other languages. Then do an image search for those words.

Note that this is only a beginning. Researcher Suzanne Ellison went deeper when researching images for my book "Ingenious Mechanicks." We were looking for images of ancient workbenches. Luckily, Jesus was a carpenter, so Suzo visited museum databases all over the world and searched for keywords in the museum's native language.

And she turned up thousands of images that we pored over.

That's when the real work begins. Read the text. Study the images. Look for references to other works. Repeat until you run out of Tylenol and your eyeballs dry out.

OK, now for some Nerd Meat.

Oh, About 'De l'Exploitation des Bois'

This has been a project that Jeff Burks and I have flirted with for the last nine years. We even had a few sections translated to see if the text was promising or not. Want to see for yourself? Click here to download one of the professionally translated sections. Plate II is at the top of this entry. Plate III is above.

I think you might find that this book is a hard road.

Also, for the glue nerds: Duhamel wrote a book about hide glue that has been nicely translated into English. Want to read that to get educated? Here you go.