Chairmaker's Notebook, Peter Galbert (book)

Whether you are an aspiring professional chairmaker, an experienced green woodworker or a home woodworker curious about the craft, Chairmaker's Notebook is an in-depth guide to building your first Windsor chair or an even-better 30th one. Using more than 500 hand-drawn illustrations, Peter Galbert walks you through the entire process, from selecting wood at the log yard, to the chair's robust joinery, to applying a hand-burnished finish.

If you've never thought about building a chair, this book might convince you to try. Building a chair will open your eyes to ways of working wood that you might miss if you stay in the rectilinear world of boxes. Once you understand chairmaking, odd and compound angles become child's play, you will know how wood works in a deeper way, and you will gain access to open-ended tools such as the drawknife that will fundamentally change the way you work.

At 406 pages, the book is an in-depth look at the craft from the hand of a professional chairmaker, teacher and artist. During the last 15 years, Galbert has developed processes, tools and ways of understanding joinery that have simplified the way people build chairs using hand tools, and he spent more than three years drawing out every step of the process. The book starts with understanding a single stick you would find on a walk in the woods and takes you into advanced areas of the chair craft.

Printed on heavy matte 8.5" x 11" paper with sewn signatures, hardbound in cloth with a full-color dust jacket. Published by Lost Art Press and produced entirely in the United States.