Sunday, August 9, is National Book Lovers Day. Reading and books are important parts of most people’s lives, especially in the current Coronavirus pandemic that calls for avoiding crowds and staying close to home.
In observance of this event in 2020, we are revisiting a still relevant 2017 Woodcraft Magazine article by Joe Hurst-Wajszczuk about Best Books for Woodworkers. It appeared in Issue 80 and was posted as a downloadable blog on woodcraft.com. We have included the introduction, a link to the blog, and the downloadable pdf.
BEST BOOKS FOR WOODWORKERS
By Joe Hurst-Wajszczuk
The person who coined the saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” just might have been a woodworker. Admittedly, new tools and materials have made certain operations faster, safer, and easier, but if a woodworker from the 1900s could visit your workshop, he’d have a tougher time with the K-cup coffeemaker than the table saw. That’s because the basic tenets and tools of woodworking are almost timeless.
If you’ve doubted the possibility of crossing paths with time-travelling woodworkers, think again. Thanks to books, these experts can still share their advice on every aspect of woodworking, from outfitting your shop, to applying the final coat of finish.
To compile a short stack of must-have titles, we asked the staff to share their favorites, and then divided the list into categories. Whether you’re looking for gift ideas or buying books for yourself, you’re sure to find a few valuable additions to any library.
In addition to current titles, we’ve included a few classics that are worth the hunt. If you don’t mind a few dog-eared pages, you’ll discover that great information can be had for pennies on the dollar.
Click here to read the rest of the blog. Or click below to download this PDF file.
Books and the Printing Press
Men and women were writing poems, songs, prayers, and stories for hundreds of years before there was an easy means to reproduce and distribute an original document. Enter goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg, who was a political exile from Mainz, Germany, when he began experimenting with printing in Strasbourg, France, in 1440. He returned to Mainz several years later and by 1450, had a printing machine perfected and ready to use commercially: The Gutenberg press.
In 1455, Gutenberg produced what is considered to be the first book ever printed: a Latin language Bible, printed in Mainz. The Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible, the Mazarin Bible or the B42) was among the earliest major books printed using mass-produced movable metal type in Europe. It marked the start of the “Gutenberg Revolution” and the age of printed books in the West.
Over the next several centuries, more and more people learned to read in the United States, and many many more books were written, thousands of them living in libraries that made books even more accessible to the public. In June 2019, there were an estimated 116,867 libraries of all kinds in the United States. The Library of Congress is the largest library in the United States.
Research Shows Americans Access Books In More than the Print Versions
On the Pew Research Center website, Andrew Perrin’s article “One-in-five Americans now listen to audiobooks” offers statistics about readers in the US and how they are accessing “books,” which are no longer just in printed format.
He writes in his Sept. 25, 2019, article:
Americans are spreading their book consumption across several formats, and the use of audiobooks is on the rise.
Roughly seven-in-ten U.S. adults (72%) say they have read a book in the past 12 months in any format, a figure that has remained largely unchanged since 2012, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Jan. 8-Feb. 7, 2019. Print books remain the most popular format for reading, with 65% of adults saying they had read a print book in the year before the survey.
And while shares of print and e-book readers are similar to those from a Center survey conducted in 2016, there has been an uptick in the share of Americans who report listening to audiobooks, from 14% to 20%.
Overall, Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, while the typical (median) American has read four books in the past 12 months. Each of these figures is largely unchanged since 2011, when the Center first began conducting the surveys of Americans’ book reading habits.
Click here to finish reading this article.
