Reply To: Advice for some furniture books
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I know this is a bit late but hopefully the info will help some others looking for inspiration as well.
I love the internet and how it brings information to the masses. I’ll provide a few of my favorite sources.
Design blogs are a great resource for inspiration. Sometimes the furniture is one-off or proof of concept and not actually in production, but still it’s great inspiration.
http://www.furniturefashion.com/
http://dornob.com/
http://www.dwell.com/
http://www.remodelista.com/
I found this on a design blog and one day I’ll build something like it for the garage.
http://www.dannykuo.com/staircasep1.html
http://www.dannykuo.com/staircase.html
Various woodworking magazines like Family Handyman and of course Fine Woodworking often have plans or excerpts available on their sites for free. You can use a custom google search to find just the plans and excerpts without the need for browsing every article.
Try this custom google search text and paste it into the google search box:
site:finewoodworking.com filetype:pdf
This custom search tells google to limit the search to only finewoodworking.com and only pdf files. Note that you do not include the “http://” part of the web site name, and there is no space after the “site:” and again there is no space after the “filetype:”
This one is more specific: site:finewoodworking.com filetype:pdf chest
This tells google to limit the search to only finewoodworking.com and only pdf files that relate to the word “chest”.
Here are a couple different google site searches to start with but feel free to make your own “site” substitutions.
site:popularwoodworking.com filetype:pdf
site:woodsmith.com filetype:pdf
http://www.archive.org
archive.org is a great refrence for lots of stuff, mostly older it seems. It includes catalogs as well as books which are now long out of print. Searching for “woodworking” yielded a ton of Fine Woodworking magazines in PDF.
https://archive.org/details/camille_harp_hushmail_0203
Who would want to read this old catalog from 1949?
https://archive.org/details/StanleyToolsCatalogNo.34
Here is a fun old furniture catalog.
https://archive.org/details/FurnitureForumAHandbookOfContemporaryDesign
http://www.ibiblio.org is similar to archive.org
Project Gutenberg is an online library with a goal of digitizing 1,000,000 books.
http://www.gutenberg.org
Here’s a guide on building Mission style furniture
Part 1 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23770
Part 2 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23991
Part 3 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23666
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Woodwork
Project Gutenberg makes their books available in multiple formats. epub is great for reading on Android devices and also computers. Apple’s iOS maybe not so great for epub. On a computer, I find the ebook viewer that comes with Calibre ebook library organizer is excellent for viewing epub files. Calibre is free and runs on windows and Mac. http://calibre-ebook.com/
For those using firefox as their web browser, there is an epub ad-on you can install to read epub format ebooks right in your browser. It will automatically save the epub into it’s own library which is saved in your firefox profile so you can go back to the books without the need to go online or remember where you got the ebook. It will then display them in firefox for you.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epubreader/
There is a similar ad-on for the google chrome browser.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readium/fepbnnnkkadjhjahcafoaglimekefifl
Hope this is good information for you and helps provide you with a good start to searching for your own design inspiration and continued education in woodworking.