rlabbe

Okay, so it's fine to publish an article by a professional woodworker making Greene & Greene knockoffs for sale, but not okay to, well, make a Greene & Greene knockoff for sale? Hmm.

Yes, that was a bit tongue in cheek, I *do* recognize the nuances here. However, I just pulled a magazine randomly out of my collection. It is the October 2006 issue.

We have an article on an Arts and Craft side table, where the author writes it "dates back to designs by Gustav Stickley.

A few pages later we have an whole article entitled 'Copying Museum Pieces'.

Then we have an article named "Philadelphia Side Chair", which tells you how to build a chair in the Garvan collection at Yale.

Then let's wander over to the Reader's Gallery. Julia Mclain, which google reveals to be a professsional, has a copy of a Normal Tooth Chest - she even went to a museum to copy measurements. Flip the page and we have a clock copied from a book.

Then we have articles on carving a Chippendale ball-and-claw foot, and replicating a fumed oak finish.

Flipping through the ads in the back I find classes on making Windsor chairs, kits for "authentic reproductions", etc.

I'm not saying that excuses copying a contemporary builder's design (say, Maloof) for the mass market, but let's be realistic about the degree to which FWW encourages copying, and how much the professional contributors to the magazine copy. To me it doesn't matter if somebody looked at an mission chair and ended up making the arms 1/4" wider than the original, or whatever. Anyone seeing the chair would immediately say "mission chair". You copied, even if you used a dovetail where the original used a locking rabbet or whatever.