Book Review and Taunton Press Rant (long)
Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA
>I recently finished the (relatively) new (published 2003) Taunton Press book, "The Workshop: Celebrating the Place Where Craftsmanship Begins" by Scott Gibson. It consists of two or three page descriptions of the shops of various woodworkers, but is close to content-free as far as actual useful information for someone who plans to work in a workshop. It's kind of a passive, consumerist, book for the person who thinks buying the current cool tool means s/he is Working Wood. The astute reader will have picked up by now that this is a negative review - don't even waste your time checking it out of the library, and certainly don't buy it.
People have expressed their problems with Scott Landis' "The Workshop Book" (published in 1991), but at least he made a serious effort to examine what went into laying out and creating a usable shop, and, in touring various shops, examined how those shops worked and how their owners designed them. I've found it useful for my own shop and plan to read it extensively when the time comes (in the next couple of years, I hope) to expand beyond my little tiny shoplet.
I think these two books epitomize the direction that Taunton Press has gone in the 1990's and new century on the woodworking front. Fine Homebuilding is still a useful magazine, although they run circular saw reviews a little too often, but, as some threads have discussed, Fine Woodworking's quality has slipped in recent years (I can't speak for their other areas of gardening, cooking, and fabric stuff - I've never cracked the cover of any of those magazines). Perhaps FWW is responding to the market, but, if so, it's sad - I'd like to think there are enough people actually ruining bits of wood on the weekends and getting covered with shavings and sweat to justify publishing a magazine and books that will be helpful to them, and still be of interest to the armchair woodworker.
