“By hammer and hand
all things do stand.”– From the title page
I am proud to own a set of “Audel’s Guides to the Building Trades,” another thoughtful gift from my beautiful wife. She found them buried in the back of a tiny antique shop in Alvin, Tex. where the shopkeeper kindly discounted the price due to a mismatched Volume Two. This pocket sized, encyclopedia-like series was first published in 1923 and is filled with EVERYTHING needed to explain the art of carpentry and construction, and it does so with a sends-you-back-in-time, 1920s vernacular. The 1,600-page set reviews tools, methods of measuring, construction know-how, the dos and don’ts of project execution, wood shrinkage, and even lessons in the geometry and trigonometry (uh, no thanks) used in house framing. Unless you actually need to bone up on a particular subject, reading for comprehension will make your head spin. As a graphic designer, I’m in awe at the production work that went in to these books—the old-school illustrations alone are incredible—and I totally nerd-out on the 100-year-old aesthetics of worn covers, gold foiled spines, and yellowed, musty pages.