The Workshop Book

Scott Landis

Reviewed by:

Robert Weber

The Workshop Book by Scott Landis is the third part of Taunton's slipcover "trilogy" along with Landis' The Workbench Book and Jim Tolpin's The Toolbox Book. The Workshop Book does for workspaces what his The Workbench Book did for workholding devices, albeit with slightly less depth and verbosity. The author explains that much less historical evidence of workshops exists than of workbenches for various reasons.

The book is divided up into nine chapters that roughly cover history, layout, equipment, and examples. The first chapter is a history of workspaces as far as can be known. Historical examples of workspaces have not survived the way tools and workbenches have. Still, the author provides interesting and informative narrative.

Chapters 2, 3 and 5 speak to the workshop as a space. Chapter 2 is about location, looking at where people put their shops. Examples include basements, garages, separate buildings and rented spaces. Chapter 3 is about laying out the workspace itself, in terms of storage, benches, machines and workflow. Chapter 5 addresses the support systems of the workshop, such as dust control, lighting and compressed air.

Chapters 4, 8 and 9 are about equipping the workshop. Chapter 4 looks at machinery in a general way, and talks about why different wookworkers make the choices they make in selecting their tools. Chapters 8 and 9 are on Storage and Jigs & Fixtures, respectively. These chapters are generally made up of pictures of solutions created by woodworkers, and brief descriptions of how they are constructed. There are no detailed construction drawings anywhere in this book.

Scattered throughout almost all the chapters are photos, floor plans and descriptions of working shops, but chapters 6 and 7 are dedicated entirely to these. Chapter 6 is about specialty shops, such as luthier and chairmaking shops, and Chapter 7 reviews several dream shops, with the understanding that one person's dream is not necessarily another's.

One of my favorite aspects of this book is the illustrated floor plans of the various shops. These are much more valuable than simple photographs in understanding how work flow from one part of the shop to another, and how the various tools relate to one another.

If I didn't purchase all three books together in their slipcase, this would be the last of the three that I bought, but is it valuable nonetheless. Seeing how other craftsmen and woodworkers perform their tasks helps me as a hobbyist maximize my limited time in my little 9 x12 workroom.