Fine Woodworking & Darley's barn
Moses Yoder in White Pigeon, MI
>When I got to Darley's Barn Sunday morning right around 7 am I was handed my registration packet, which ended up containing a certificate for 25 "Darley Bucks". Names were drawn at random to get these certificates which are as good as cash for any purchases made that day at the tool seller's tables. Since I had not taken much cash with me due to my garage sale expenditures and boat improvements, this made the day quite a bit more fun than I anticipated. After finding a very nice D-7 saw, I think probably a 22" blade, for $5 (complete with fairly clean metal and no hang holes) at the second table I looked at, I spotted a pretty nice set of FWW magazines. They are in pretty much chronological order starting at issue #60 or so (writing from memory) and there were 56 magazines. They were boxed in sets of 18 magazines, and he was asking $15 per box. Realizing how heavy these would be to load back up, and the fact that you always dicker at tool sales, I offered him $30 for the lot of 3 boxes. He said he can't do that but he could sell them for $35, and they became mine. I wouldn't have bought these without the Darley's bucks certificate, but I am certainly glad I did. I ended up buying another pretty nice D-7 complete with hang hole, from Carl Hildebrand who is becoming famous in Popular Woodworking so he thought it was worth $15 and told me I really had nerve to ask him to sell it for $10 ;) I have been reading the FWW magazines, and have to say that the current managers of FWW should buy themselves a set of issues #60-80 and compare it to what they are publishing today.
One of these magazines has the back cover where FWW originally published the picture of the Studley tool chest, another has the article on the chest, and then there is the one where the poster was originally advertised for sale at $9.95. I could really kick myself for not buying several, but I realize now why I didn't. The poster came out for sale in 1989, which is the year when I stopped caring about anything much besides Megan, and we became married in 1990. I was saving money to buy our house, so didn't spend the $10 for the poster :) This might be one of the first items I have searched for in ebay completed auctions that came up as 0 items sold, and I have not had luck finding the poster anywhere else.