Advice for some furniture books

Hi,
I’ve been hunting for good books too-
I just picked a book by the highly recommend James Krenov (Swedish modernist/craft style). His stuff is aimed at being inspirational rather than a how-to text.
I also enjoyed Sam Maloof’s biography- beautiful pictures.
Though not really in the range you suggested, I also liked Walker and Tolpin’s “By hand and eye”, a fairly technical book on using tradional proportions and classical measurement tools (dividers/sectors/hand span). Available from Lost Art Press
john

How about, “Mouseman: The Legacy of Robert Thompson of Kilburn.

His oak furniture sells for a hefty amount these days. He died in 1955, but it is still made in North Yorkshire here in the UK. I think this is more biography, but it might still have a fair amount of his furniture and ideas in it.

I found a couple of the Shaker and Arts and Crafts furniture books on Amazon Unlimited (free if you subscribe). So if you have access search around on there a bit.

*edit* I guess it’s not free if you subscribe, but you know what I mean… lol

If your set on having hard copies this will not help you. Recently I have purchased several of the magazine collections on DVD. 25 years of Fine Woodworking or any of the others can give you a lot of inspiration. I have found it especially useful to be able to look at several plans in one place. Most have a search feature, so if you want to see side tables, you can compare size and features of 5 or 6 plans in a couple minutes and then figure out what you want. Just a thought.

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.

Home

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.

For anyone interested I just bought Making Authentic Craftsman Furniture on Amazon for $6.99, free shipping (prime).

Like dborn, I like to look at the pictures for inspiration and imagine how I’d build it.