I started this blog in 2010 while working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to document my carving project at Mount Pleasant, the historic house in East Fairmount Park. After the project was finished I continued with the blog as a way of recording my furniture conservation and restoration work.

Along the way, I added stories about projects from my decades in the field, new discoveries in historic furniture, adventures in woodcarving with research into the Addis and Herring carving tool dynasties, and my increasing interest in documenting the history of furniture making and woodworking in the Delaware River Valley. I sought to write about things that I wasn’t seeing published other places and believed I had experiences, maybe even insights, that might be of interest to those who don’t have the access to the material and the objects that I’ve been surrounded by for 45 years. 180 posts and 1,995 images over 15 years, the rewards have NOT been in Proportion to the Trouble, and we need to remedy that. For the last 15 years I’ve been doing research, scanning old photos, processing new photography, providing additional photos of objects when asked by readers to advance their work, writing over 50,000 words, for free. In fact, I must pay a yearly fee to keep this WordPress site going with additional fees for cloud memory to handle the often large files I include in the posts. Monetarily, it has been a losing proposition since the beginning. The rate of posts on the blog has slowed over the last year or so, perhaps in large part, to thinking about that type of transaction. Many friends and colleagues in the historic furniture field have successfully sought ways to monetize their efforts. I hesitated to follow their lead for a long time but am now considering a new direction. Substack.com is where many have landed and that is one option though I have not signed up to date. The hunt is on and I’m open to any of your suggestions or advice. No podcasts though, I promise.

That’s a long way of saying the next post that will available shortly will be my last until I announce what I’ve come up with and can direct you there. I recently had a query from colleague in the field who asked if I would give an opinion on an example of the sort of object that will be the subject of the next post. As he unboxed it and started to walk it over to me, I instantly knew the answer to his question. I was struck, though I really shouldn’t have been, how my experience with this type of object made an authentication elementary and effortless – even at a distance. Other events in recent years concerning this category of object reminded me that even though I’ve written several posts here that can go some way to provide substantive information on this topic, longer and more detailed articles might be helpful.

My goal with the new blog/website is to continue to present information about historic furniture and woodwork that is difficult to find elsewhere. I think of the expansive shelves of books we have/had to educate ourselves about historic furniture, from Wallace Nutting’s “Furniture Treasury” through Israel Sack, Inc’s 10 volume set of “American Antiques” and hundreds of articles published throughout the twentieth century about historic furniture where you cannot find one image of the back of a chest, the construction of a drawer, or an un-upholstered easy chair. Things have improved in the twenty-first century. We now have over 30 volumes of the Chipstone Foundation’s “American Furniture” and Pat Kane and her colleagues Rhode Island Furniture Archive at the Yale University Art Gallery which continues to be updated. (Many objects in the RIFA have multiple photographs including construction details and all entries have full descriptions with information on wood species and construction characteristics, really a one of a kind effort.) An online source that I find especially noteworthy is Peter Follansbee’s WordPress blog and, since 2023, his Substack where a joiners deep knowledge of wood and tool use is combined with a historian’s grasp of seventeenth century furniture forms and extensive documentary research into craftsmen who made them. That is good news, but all is not well in the field. Inaccurate descriptions of condition and erroneous attributions seem to be turning up more and more often. I look forward to digging into some of these issues in whatever new configuration this blog takes in the future.