Hands Employed Aright, Joshua A. Klein

Hands Employed Aright by Joshua A. Klein. Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847) was the first settled minister of the frontier town of Blue Hill, Maine. Harvard-educated and handy with an axe, Fisher spent his adult life building furniture for his community, and recorded every aspect of his life as a woodworker and minister on the frontier.

Klein, the founder of Mortise & Tenon Magazine, examines what might be the most complete record of the life of an early 19th-century American craftsman. Using Fisher's papers, his tools and the surviving furniture, Klein paints a picture of a man of remarkable mechanical genius, seemingly boundless energy and the deepest devotion. It is a portrait at times both familiar and completely alien to a modern reader, and one that will likely change your view of furniture making in the early United States.

288 pages in full color on heavy coated paper, sewn, hardbound and covered in a full-color dust jacket. Printed in the United States. Published by Lost Art Press.