The Craft Doesn’t Need This Bulls%$t

How many of y’all here got started in woodworking because of the seminal work of Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann? You know – the French guy who invented Art Deco.

How about André-Charles Boulle? Perhaps the most important French cabinetmaker – ever. Born 1682. Basically, invented inlay as we know it today?

Robert Manwearing? Anyone start tinkering in their shed thanks to Big Manny (as he was called at the pub)?

Who here wasn’t called to the craft by Beurdeley, Jean-Francois Oeben or (the GOAT) Abraham Roentgen?

Edward Wormley, anyone?

Paul McCobb?

Surely… Milo Baughman.

OK, so I’d like to ask the following: That we all absolutely f-k off and lighten up on the people who make epoxy river tables and live-edge dildo racks. Please.

Yes, I know I have made jests about them before. But one day I realized something about that piece-of-shit slab with the bark on it. Yup, you know, the one that the bugs ate, had babies in. Ate their babies in. Died in. Then got eaten by other bugs.

Yup. That thing that you now want to coat with colored epoxy that is a tint of blue that can only be alien exudation. And yeah, sure, drop a few .50-cal. rounds in there just because.

Yeah – this thing. Well this thing is someone’s first up-close and personal experience with wood. Their first feel of how the planks don’t rob all the warmth from your hands when you touch them. How the sawdust, shaving and curls smell like nothing else on this earth. Better than a newborn’s head after a spring rain.

My first encounter with craft was walking into the apartment Owen Riley in the fall of 1990. Owen collected Arts & Crafts everything (even kitchenware). I became obsessed with the furniture and how it was made. I started reading Gustav Stickley’s magazine The Craftsman where he offered plans and instruction in how to build the furniture.

Of course, I thought. I’ll build all the things I love.

Six years later I got a job at Popular Woodworking Magazine, and at my first article proposal meeting I showed photos of a Byrdcliffe wall cabinet¹ (one of my favorite pieces of all time) that I thought we could reproduce for a how-to article.

At the time I didn’t know that the editor, Steve Shanesy, disliked Arts & Crafts with a venom. (Edit: he respected Greene & Greene, but that was as far as he went.)

He derided the early 20^th-century style as “Arts & Kraft” (Kraft as in the cheese food). Or sometimes “Farts & Craps” (because of the brown stain, I guess).

Steve rejected my idea.

I remember sitting there in the proposal meeting and thinking: I’m a fool. I’m a fool for having poor taste in furniture. And a fool for bringing it up at the meeting. I kept my mouth shut for a few meetings² until I better understood what was “good” and what was “Kraft.”