The Art of Joinery

n 1678, a printer and globe maker named Joesph Moxon began publishing a series of pamphlets that explored the tools and practices of six trades, including the joiner. When assembled, these pamphlets became “The Mechanick Exercises” – the first English language account of the trades.
Today, 330 years later, Moxon’s description of joiners is still important to woodworkers who incorporate hand tools into their craft. That’s because many of the practices and procedures of early craftsmen have been lost – we still don’t know exactly how they produced such beautiful work so rapidly and with such simple tools.
For the woodworker who is exploring hand work, Moxon’s chapters on woodworking offer important clues about the tools and how to use them and are essential reading. Unfortunately, “Mechanick Exercises” is out of print, and used copies fetch as much as $100.
So we decided to reprint Moxon’s writings on joinery, make them easier to read and add commentary and photos that explain early woodworking practices. We cleaned up the odd period spellings, shortened the run-on sentences without changing the meanings, and added notes in the text to help the reader. We also split up Moxon’s illustrations so the drawing of the paring chisel, for example, is with the text about the paring chisel.
Then we added a plain-spoken explanation of Moxon’s original text, which can be bedeviling at times. We tried to explain what was going on in each section of “The Art of Joinery,” and illustrated Moxon’s techniques with more than 40 photos.