My introduction to joinery

(part of a Jennie Alexander letter, Mar. 2, 1990 - instructing me about recording a joined stool through photographs…)

I’m in between a couple of things here at home right now - not enough time to get anywhere in the shop, so I picked up my Craft Genealogy folders. A central character in that project is Jennie (formerly John) Alexander (1930-2018). I’ve told the story many times of how Jennie Alexander and I taught each other to make 17th-century oak furniture without either of us knowing how to do it. That’s quite a simplification. I didn’t know in 1989 that JA had been studying 17th century furniture at Winterthur for 9 years by then. At that point of her life she barely had time for any woodworking, so it’s not like she was building a lot of pieces. From time to time she’d get to study the objects, first with Charlie Hummel, then Benno Forman, Robert Blair St. George and Bob Trent. Then she’d mull it over for weeks and weeks, filling her notebooks with ideas and theories. One of my favorite images in my mind is JA sitting outside the courtroom, waiting for her case to be called, scribbling in her notebooks. I picture her clients thinking she’s fiendishly writing some great details to help their case, but in reality she was writing down her thoughts about wood structure, joinery details, moisture contents and more. And writing letters. At some point she got a camera, tripod and slide film and began shooting construction details on the museum jaunts. The shop work then was still mostly the ladderback chairs, but some joinery experiments happened then too. 

(a JA scratch stock and the molding it produced)