At first I was skeptical of this book since the first chapter was clearly written as a textbook for an introduction to woodworking course. Despite the text book style the first chapter provided a wealth of good information and suggestions. However, the rest of the book is where the sneaky genius lies.
The remainder three chapters of the book focus on various common construction tasks: building a table, constructing a carcass, building bookshelves, building small boxes, etc. For each task the author provides discussion on the design choices, often discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various designs. The author further provides a wealth of information related to the actual construction or assembly of each task, often detailing a specific order of assembly to ensure flawless work.
In some ways The Essential Woodworker could be compared to The Joiner and Cabinet Maker where the later book similarly steps through three basic projects (a packing crate, a small storage box, and a chest of drawers), however, The Joiner and Cabinet Maker is much more of a narrative than the book under review here.
I would primarily consider The Essential Woodworker to be an introduction text. This category of wood working books is filled with a lot of low quality examples (i.e., The Practical Woodworker: A Comprehensive Step-by-step Course in Working with Wood), however, the books by Bernard Jones: The Complete Woodworker is pretty comprehensive in both their coverage of basic techniques. I do think that The Essential Woodworker does focus more on the fundamentals and would be a good choice for beginners.
I do recommend this book and for a few good reasons. First, I have watched countless hours of video blogs and The Woodwright's Shop episodes and have slowly gathered a better understanding of how to work primarily with hand tools. Many of the small details I have learned over time are detailed in this book and for that reason anyone that is new to woodworking could greatly benefit from this book.
I would also recommend this book since it focuses on the basic building blocks instead of specifically designed projects. After, reading this book I feel a bit more confident to tackle a number of projects that I have been wanting to work on for some time now.
I do however have one major criticism of this book. There are a fair number of details that I didn't fully understand. I am hoping that the next time I read through the book these details will become clear. In some cases the figures provided just didn't seem to explain the concept well enough for me to quickly understand. However, I do feel that the value of this book far outweighs the perceived negatives.
Pages: 256 Publisher: Lost Art Press ISBN-13: 978-0-578-06044-6