I thought I'd post a brief review of two woodwork-related books I have bought recently. I couldn't find much about them in advance, and they won't be in your local WH Smiths so I ordered them both in hope that I'd like them. I did.
The first is The Handplane Book by Garrett Hack, 1999. Large format, soft cover, 236 pages, illustrated in colour throughout. About £12.50, widely available.
The pictures are the chief attraction - they cover a very wide range, across historical development and by type/ function. Many of the planes illustrated are rare and valuable - but you see them lying around on benches, and it just looks so natural that you will want to see them in your own workshop.
The text covers how to choose, restore and use planes, with a lot of practical information presented in a chatty way that is just right to dip into. So it's a practical, useful book - not just gloatworthy pictures.
The second book is The Wooden Plane - Its History, Form and Function by John M Whelan, 1993. Large format, soft cover, 503 pages, 1000 illustrations. £29.50, in stock at Classic Hand Tools.
This is definitely a book on planes, not on woodworking. (But to be fair, the sections on specialist trades such as the sash maker and the cooper do relate planes back to their functions.) It's brilliantly thorough but won't tell you much about how any particular plane performs, or how to go about using it or why you might want one. It is very systematic, across several dimensions - historical development, functional group and country. All the illustrations are functional line diagrams, which are admirably clear but won't make you want to go and start a collection in the way that the Hack book can.
It covers several things I've not seen anywhere else. For example, Whelan has devised a systematic way of categorising planes - which means you can pick up an unidentified plane and still be able to look it up in the index. (It's a bit like a naturalist's "key".) There's a glossary of plane terms in French, German Dutch and Japanese, so you can tell your Voorlooper from your naga-dai-kanna should you need to. (Perhaps useful on distant ebay sites...)
There is a 52 page exhaustive/exhausting catalogue of complex moulding planes - and a systematised approach to naming them.
Both books are US in origin so inevitably focus on US developments first, but there is much shared history between US and UK, so that does not detract. And the Whelan book tries hard to cover other countries - making it clear how wide the differences are across Europe, though some of these are not illustrated - even this book has to stop somewhere.
But for anyone on this forum, if you have not got either of them already, I'd recommend them both as complementing each other's areas nicely.
The first is The Handplane Book by Garrett Hack, 1999. Large format, soft cover, 236 pages, illustrated in colour throughout. About £12.50, widely available.
The pictures are the chief attraction - they cover a very wide range, across historical development and by type/ function. Many of the planes illustrated are rare and valuable - but you see them lying around on benches, and it just looks so natural that you will want to see them in your own workshop.
The text covers how to choose, restore and use planes, with a lot of practical information presented in a chatty way that is just right to dip into. So it's a practical, useful book - not just gloatworthy pictures.
The second book is The Wooden Plane - Its History, Form and Function by John M Whelan, 1993. Large format, soft cover, 503 pages, 1000 illustrations. £29.50, in stock at Classic Hand Tools.
This is definitely a book on planes, not on woodworking. (But to be fair, the sections on specialist trades such as the sash maker and the cooper do relate planes back to their functions.) It's brilliantly thorough but won't tell you much about how any particular plane performs, or how to go about using it or why you might want one. It is very systematic, across several dimensions - historical development, functional group and country. All the illustrations are functional line diagrams, which are admirably clear but won't make you want to go and start a collection in the way that the Hack book can.
It covers several things I've not seen anywhere else. For example, Whelan has devised a systematic way of categorising planes - which means you can pick up an unidentified plane and still be able to look it up in the index. (It's a bit like a naturalist's "key".) There's a glossary of plane terms in French, German Dutch and Japanese, so you can tell your Voorlooper from your naga-dai-kanna should you need to. (Perhaps useful on distant ebay sites...)
There is a 52 page exhaustive/exhausting catalogue of complex moulding planes - and a systematised approach to naming them.
Both books are US in origin so inevitably focus on US developments first, but there is much shared history between US and UK, so that does not detract. And the Whelan book tries hard to cover other countries - making it clear how wide the differences are across Europe, though some of these are not illustrated - even this book has to stop somewhere.
But for anyone on this forum, if you have not got either of them already, I'd recommend them both as complementing each other's areas nicely.
- Rob
