| | 11/29/2011 | 
The single greatest magazine ever written for Do-it-yourselfers was WORK An Illustrated Magazine of Practice and Theory for all Workmen, Professional and Amateur
In England, beginning in 1889, every two weeks you got a 16 page magazine crammed with advice, tips, and stuff to do. The projects ranged from the mundane - making a rabbit hutch, all the way to building things like carriages. Unlike today where modern magazines usually contain only a few projects accompanied by a blow by blow description of the construction, "Work" just gave you the basics, but had tons of projects in each issue. The style was made possible by basic drawings, and a simple build sequence only. Here is a link to an old issue on Google books and you can see all the crazy stuff you can build.
What killed the magazine was most probably the age of specialization. by the early 20th century specialty magazine such as the Model Engineer or The Woodworker split up the generalist market and this style of magazine faded away. In the US Popular Mechanics was one of the few magazines that tried to retain it's generalist nature.
One of the Editors of Work Magazine, Paul Hasluck, took lots of the articles, many of the authors (some like George Ellis, still well known today as major writers on woodworking), and put out some of the best compendiums of craft ever. We reprinted Carpentry and Joinery Illustrated and I don't think there ever has been another book as comprehensive on architectural woodworking.
We just mailed out a mini catalog. It's only sixteen pages , just a short something for fun. Its inspiration was old catalogs and old woodworking magazines. We had fun with this and it's basically the catalog we would be printing if we were around in 1910. Inside the book we decided to put in a few pages of plans from "Work" for a workbench, a sled, and a purfling cutter. Another thing in the catalog is a couple of pages of isometric drafting paper, which is awfully useful for sketching. If you didn't get a copy - and I am sorry but we will not be doing any more mailings - you can download the mini catalog and all the Work plans here and the isometric paper here. We have also added new menu items in the Knowledge section for both topics.
Incidentally our new hammers, shown below after filing and polishing are at the hardeners and we are mostly on schedule for end of year delivery (hopefully before Christmas but "there is many a slip between cup and lip"). We get asked about mortise chisel availability for the holiday - Maybe, but it looks touch and go.
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great post-;) the new mini catalog is wonderful and the Gramercy tools work sooo well in that style. Fantastic job. Thanks for the isometric paper download as well- very good idea.
all the best in the coming Holiday Season.
Tom
https://mail.sd35.bc.ca/~sSmithson/FOV2-000398EE/3D%20Shapes%20on%20Dot%20Paper.pdf?Plugin=Loft
I really enjoyed the style and feel, it's way beyond what we normally see.