From Truths to Tools

From Truths to Tools by Jim Tolpin and George Walker. Good books give you a glimpse of small truths, about workbenches, joinery or sharpening, for example. Great books, on the other hand, stitch together seemingly disparate ideas to present a new way of looking at the whole world, from your marking awl, to your hand or to the line of the horizon.

The book is a hand-illustrated work that masquerades as a children's book. There are funny drawings. There aren't a lot of words. You can read all 208 pages in one sitting. But it somehow explains the craft, the entire physical world, our language and geometry in a way that makes you feel like the authors have revealed a huge secret to you, one that has been sitting in front of you your entire life.

The book begins with an explanation of a circle and a single point, and then shows how those simple ideas can be used to create an entire set of layout tools, such as a try square, a straightedge and dividers, that allow you to build furniture. Once you understand the language behind your tools, very complicated things become easy to understand: compound joinery, fitting odd miters, making curves that taper. And from there it's a short hop to grasp how the same ideas can be applied to building anything of any shape imaginable, such as skyscrapers, boats and bridges.

From Truths to Tools is the third book from the geometry-loving team of Jim Tolpin and George Walker. Their first book, By Hand & Eye, makes the case that simple whole-number ratios are the underpinning of the built world and our furniture. Their second book, By Hound & Eye, gives you the exercises that open your eyes to the way geometry and ratios govern our world. Published by Lost Art Press.