Dictionary of American Hand Tools

Alvin Sellens

Reviewed by:

Bob Nelson

Imagine someone with over 200 old time tool sales catalogs regrouping all the tools in all of them into alphabetic order and putting them in a book - using the line drawings from the catalogs as illustrations. That's essentially what this book is and that's both its strength and its weakness.

The strength is that is saves you having to assemble the 200+ catalogs used and trying to find any specific tools of interest in their random order listings; if you have at least some idea what a tool's name might be, you can find it directly or via the extensive cross referencing of names that Sellens provides. A related strength is that the book covers a full gamut of many types of tools; besides woodworking, there are blacksmithing, cement working, plumbing, railroad, shoe making, clock repair, etc., tools. Although I'll now cite a larger number of weaknesses, many people will feel that those two major strengths more than balance the sum of the more minor weaknesses.

The book lists very few tools that don't appear in trade catalogs (i.e., inventor made/sold tools, user and blacksmith made tools, etc.). Although it professes to also include some British tools, those would only be ones listed in the catalogs of American dealers who imported them for sale. The book provides very little information beyond what might be found in a catalog. Where relevant, it does correlate tools to the trades using them and does include entries of about 40 trades with listings of the various tools used in them. The brief and rather dry informational writeups are satisfactory for most reference usages, but are not conducive to pleasure reading beyond that. The tool names are those used in catalogs and do not necessarily include other U.K., slang, regional, etc., names.

In summary, this book can serve as a very useful reference source for anyone having periodic interests in looking for minimal data on what old tools from a variety of trades were named and what they did. Although R.A. Salaman's Dictionary of Woodworking Tools is much better for that specific type of tool, the Sellens book covers many more tools from a full range of major trades.