Building a storage shed

It has been more than a dozen years since Fine Woodworking magazine published Design Book Seven, the most recent in a series that periodically explored contemporary woodworking. As was the case with its predecessors, this last iteration included a little bit of everything — not only chairs and desks and beds but also carvings and sculpture, even a hand-cranked wooden toy. It was a compilation of the best and most imaginative work that came to the attention of editors at Fine Woodworking.

In the interim, The Taunton Press launched and eventually folded Home Furniture, a magazine devoted to furniture design, not construction. Although Home Furniture never quite managed the circulation it needed for long-term survival, its demise left many woodworkers wishing there were more opportunities to look at current work. So, late last year, Fine Woodworking Publisher Anatole Burkin decided the time was right for an updated version of the Design Book series.

There would be several changes between the old series and its offspring, what first became Fine Woodworking Furniture: 102 Contemporary Designs published last fall as a magazine, and now republished in book form as Design Book Eight.

For starters, Design Book Eight is limited to functional furniture, meaning that turnings, sculpture, musical instruments and the like would not be included. How come? We wanted to reach the greatest number of furnituremakers with design ideas that would be useful in their own work. We also decided to limit the collection to contemporary pieces. In making that early decision, we realized we would be excluding the many talented furnituremakers who turn out first-rate period reproductions. Yet we hoped it also would keep the collection more focused and more accessible.

With those loose ground rules in place, we encouraged furnituremakers to send in their best work — and send they did. Once submissions were all in (a half-dozen large cardboard boxes worth) they were reviewed by a group of four: Anatole Burkin; Helen Albert, executive editor of Taunton books; and two former editors at Fine Woodworking, Jonathan Binzen, now a consulting editor, and me. All of us are woodworkers. Jessica DiDonato from the Taunton books staff provided the considerable editorial assistance the project required.

Readers with some of the early Design Books in their libraries may remember that each piece was accompanied by a simple caption listing the basics: name of the maker, name of the piece (if it had one), materials, dimensions. We thought it would be interesting to include more this time so we sent questionnaires to each of the artisans who had been selected and asked them to tell us about themselves, their shops, how they worked and what they had in mind with the design of the piece or pieces we had selected. Their answers were variably rich with detail, painfully short or something in between. But in any case, it was an opportunity for these artists and artisans to explain in their own words such things as how they arrived at a design, why they used a certain kind of wood and what their shops and work schedules are like. It has been an opportunity for us to peer into their creative train of thought. When you see a direct quote from a maker, that’s where it comes from. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the quality of the work you’ll find in these pages. As you’ll see, there’s still plenty of that.

Scott Gibson

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