A workshop is much more than a physical place full of tools. It is the place where a woodworker imagines, designs, tries, fails and succeeds in making something beautiful out of wood. Some shops are used to earn a living, some to pass on the craft. In all shops new designs are forged, limits are tested, and art is created.

Author Scott Gibson takes you on a guided tour of over 30 workshops. Youll meet furniture makers, boat builders, turners, and others -- all of whom share a common love: creating in wood. Over 290 photos give you an inside look at these outstanding shops. Youll learn how they evolved and how they suit the individual needs of the woodworkers who own them.

The Workshop:

• Is a highly visual look at more than 30 amazing workshops and the fascinating people who use them.
• Celebrates the wide variety of wood craft, providing points of inspiration and identification for anyone dreaming of becoming a woodworker.
• Uses the shops and visits to their owners/users to tell the story of why people are drawn to creative expression in wood.

About the author
Scott Gibson is a former editor at Fine Homebuilding, Fine Woodworking and Home Furniture magazines who now works as a freelance writer, editor and photographer from his home in southern Maine. A contributing editor to Fine Homebuilding, he writes about residential building, architecture and furniture for a number of publications. He is a long-time furniture maker whose work has appeared in Fine Woodworking.

"This is not just another book about shops -- not that I ever mind the opportunity to snoop around other woodworker's shops and shop solutions. Instead, Scott acknowledges that our shops are, in essence, a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) expression of their owners -- and that breathes life as well as lessons into these stories of workspaces around the country".

-- Jim Tolpin

Introduction

The Workshop Legacy

Backyard Simplicity
DAVID STILES

Nature in the Rough
JON BROOKS

Carving Delight
JEFFREY COOPER

Furniture as Art
MICHAEL CREED

A World of Tiny Details
JACQUES VESERY

A Shop for Two
DAVID AND MICHELLE HOLZAPFEL

Time for Play
BARBARA BUTLER

Man with a Mission
MARC ADAMS

A Century of Teaching Excellence
NORTH BENNET STREET SCHOOL

A Window in Time
COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG

An Inspired Shop for Kids
RICHARD STARR

A Rural Teaching Tradition
DREW LANGSNER

High-Tech on the Waterfront
DOUGLAS GREEN

A Woodworking Legacy
MIRA NAKASHIMA-YARNALL

Making a Mark
ALAN BRADSTREET

An American Garage Classic
ANNA CARTER

Shaker with a Twist
CHRISTIAN BECKSVOORT

Life on a New Hampshire Hilltop
TOM MCLAUGHLIN

Keeping Arts and Crafts Alive
KEVIN RODEL AND SUSAN MACK

A Country Character
JACOB CRESS

Wyoming Mountain Retreat
DON RAWLINGS

High Art in the High Desert
JAMES WILEY

A Shop Run Wild
WILLIAM TURNER

A Turner's Life
DON STINSON

A Shop in Concert
ROBERT ABRAMS

High Flyer
LORAN SMITH

Master of Curves
JERE OSGOOD

Earth-Berm Shop
SETH ROLLAND

Reviving an Ontario Homestead
MICHAEL FORTUNE

High Precision, High Style
SCOTT SCHMIDT

Machine Power
STEPHEN COTTER

A Dane in California
EJLER HJORTH-WESTH

Making a New Life
RANDY MARTIN

There is no perfect workshop. Any image conjured up by one woodworker would probably be less than ideal for the next. There are, however, many wonderful shops. Contemporary woodworkers share a common cultural heritage with a nation of resourceful settlers who made do with what could be patched together. Hundreds of years later, we still manage to find places to set up our tools and work, no matter where we live. If the basement or garage workshop has become the icon of the weekend do-it-yourselfer, woodworkers have also made themselves comfortably at home in endlessly creative spaces. At its simplest, a shop doesn't take much to be successful: a bit of roof, a bench, and a corner where a tool chest can be stored.

The workshops in this book were chosen because they fairly represent the diverse spaces in which American woodworkers now find themselves. There are shops in recycled button factories, two-car garages, white clapboard buildings in tiny New England villages, old onion barns, industrial parks, and strip malls. Many woodworkers looking through these pages will think of a favorite shop they've seen -- their own or one they've visited -- and wonder why it has not been included. No list could possibly be complete, but there is some common ground here. Nearly all of the shops in this book are relatively small, just big enough for one or two woodworkers. Not counting the woodworking schools, the largest covers roughly 9,000 sq. ft. If that seems generous by most standards, it is still nothing more than a speck compared with the factories that produce much of the nation's furniture and woodenware.

Woodworkers prove as diverse as their shops. Some keep their workspaces fastidiously clean. Their tools are carefully arranged in drawers and on walls, and not a single wood shaving litters the floor. At the other end of the spectrum are spaces seemingly arranged by happenstance. Tools, lumber, furniture parts, and bits of hardware lie abandoned where they were last needed. Woodworkers who have been in the same space for many years often accumulate an agreeable clutter that makes them feel at home. Walls are painted or decorated with photographs torn from magazines or postcards. For others, a shop itself seems to hold little inherent interest; it's just four walls and a roof.

However different they may look, all of these shops exude an air of creativity and inventiveness. Each is a place where an artisan, professional or amateur, turns raw materials that could be almost anything into an object that is only one thing. Whether the piece is sold, given away, or ends up in the dining room of the person who made it hardly matters.

What can we learn from a tour of nearly three dozen small woodshops? Something, I hope. Most woodworkers seem curious about the workshops of others. And while these profiles of shops and their owners are not intended as technical descriptions of lighting, wiring, dust collection, or lumber storage, nor as recommendations on what kind of vise or table saw to buy, a detail in a photograph or a woodworker's description of his work habits may suggest a solution to another woodworker who has been wrestling with the same problem. In truth, however, most of these details are no more important than the intent and expectations we bring to our work -- maybe less. Great shops are really a combination of all of these things, not only how we arrange the space and stock it with tools and raw materials but also how we use the space when we get there.