ANCIENT CARPENTERS' TOOLS
HENRY C. MERCER, BUCKS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 1975
It may have happened to you, as it has to me: the sensation of holding an implement or object in one’s hand, the purpose of which is unknown. It’s usually what happens when I’m looking through a bucket of rusty farm tools in an antique shop, or, more likely, forgotten in a corner of someone’s barn. It's a tough truth that many of the tools that get left somewhere to become part of the humus from whence they came are broken, unremarkable, unwieldy pieces of rural life that were quite justifiably discarded when a better alternative presented itself. That said, some pieces of rusty junk can be incredibly eloquent about their time and place, if only their function weren’t obscured by ignorance.
At the Danville Inn, the Algonquin Hotel of my part of northern Vermont, a certain regular has gotten in the habit of bringing an odd tool or household implement to Saturday’s buffet dinner that he himself may not know the purpose of, and it is passed from table to table at the inn and openly discussed, so that by the time it makes the rounds back to its owner, the assembled company are amused, perplexed, confirmed in their cleverness, or left grasping in the dark. Past entries have included a part of a bain-marie, a fireplace toast rack, and an accusatory-looking brass priapus mounted horizontally on a swiveling oak stand, which much to my relief turned out to be a form for repairing gloves. One that still irks me was a small rosewood octagon, about one inch in diameter and 3/8” thick, which had a small adjustable brass blade screwed to one facet, like a plane iron. It was beautifully made, but I have no earthly idea what it was made for. Were I a luthier, perhaps I would know. One problem is that some tools were made by one craftsman for one unique purpose, or one unique workspace. For much of the history of the American colonies and beyond, the only way to have tools was to make them yourself. The irons and blades might have been imported from Sheffield, but to save on shipping costs, a craftsman would fashion tool handles and bodies after their arrival. Making tools was no stranger a practice than making the final objects themselves. When you’re making absolutely everything by hand, and doing so repeatedly, any economy that can result from having a tool perfectly adapted to your needs makes custom tooling an effort worth expending, and some craftsmen found singular and creative solutions to their needs, which may remain forever mysterious to those who come across their tools decades later.
An 18th century engraving,used by Mercer to illustrate the saw handle in the foreground as a very early type, rare in the American colonies.
It’s for these reasons that a book such as Henry Mercer’s admirable Ancient Carpenters’ Tools is one of my favorite compendia. It’s the answers to the riddles, the morphology of the tools given voice. It’s page after page of getting to have the sensation of remembering something you’ve been trying to claw into the light from the edge of memory. It’s the epiphany of a name half-recalled snapping into crisply-syllabled focus. It’s also incredibly interesting when read cover-to-cover as a whole, much as is Charles Hummel’s astonishing With Hammer In Hand (indeed, Mr. Hummel furnished the foreword for this edition of Ancient Carpenters’ Tools, which is better than any laudatory bumf on the cover could do in terms of lending it weight and legitimacy, though this book predates Hummel's ponderous tome by decades). Mercer’s book is genuinely a significant one in the context of the history of technology. Calling the book’s tools ‘ancient’ may strike us as odd, because the overwhelming majority are of 17th and 18th century design. Mercer himself was a Harvard-educated lawyer and archaeologist who headed up American archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania’s museum. By the late 1890s Mercer was lecturing on tools as archaeological artifacts, and collecting interesting examples out of trash heaps. When he ran the Bucks County Historical Society, he essentially opened a dedicated tool museum. When you consider that in the late 1890s the tools that were in use were still pre-power tool evolutions of the ‘ancient’ tools he writes about, one can see that Mercer was way ahead of his time in terms of serious study of everyday objects. When he published Ancient Carpenters’ Tools for the first time in 1929, he himself didn’t think anyone would read it, but it’s become an authoritative guide to hand tools, albeit primarily American and European ones. The term ‘Ancient’ may have been to lend archaeological gravitas to a subject Mercer felt slightly insecure about, but it also shows that the divide in his mind between manufactured and handmade was likely the same as the divide between modern and ancient. It’s been through several editions: my copy is the 1975 fifth edition, just because I’m a Charlie Hummel fan-boy. I think I bought it on AbeBooks for a few bucks. Amazon is selling a 2016 reprint of the 1950 edition. Why 1950 is anybody’s guess.
This truly ancient tool, found in a well in England, is only superficially different from English infill planes of the 19th century.
Some of my favorite entries in this book are the ones on ancient Roman tools, because if you found them in a workshop today they might not jump out as being 2000 years old. Tools such as claw hammers, files, planes, pincers and augers are only superficially different, and in some cases not different at all. Each page, accompanied by photographs and historic artwork showing artisans at work (mythological or earthly), is wonderfully arranged and written. It is quite literally a glossary of ancient language, and one thing I noticed in particular about axes was how subtle the specializations in each one’s particular purpose were. I suppose an axe isn’t a terribly complicated thing to make, but the physical demands of axe-work would make very fine levels of specialization an obvious choice. Axes for hewing timbers have handles which curve away from the heads so that hands clear the log, and less contortion is needed. Asymmetrical bulges in splitting axe heads help wedge, pop and cleave wood along the grain of a swing, and adzes show innumerable variations in the sweeps of their heads and handles, as standing slightly bent over and smoothing a timber beneath one’s feet is agonizing work without a tool which is essentially bespoke to each user’s purpose. The morphology of lathing and shingling hatchets is even illuminating. The flat top of the axe is needed to clear the ceiling while pounding in nails at the top of a wall. It’s this kind of special knowledge that gives any tool nerd a frisson, because one becomes a party to revealed knowledge – the same kind of power as knowing how a magic trick is done, except that the destruction of the mystery in the case of tools is highly enriching, and satisfying. This volume will certainly form a cornerstone of my reference library for when I eventually write my authoritative ‘Ancient Carpenters’ Books.'
