Benchmarks: Rollie Johnson on Lessons from the Masters
Apr 01, 2019
In February of 1978 I was in the Co-op Hardware store in the Cedar-Riverside area of Minneapolis. Somewhere between the wood stoves and chicken brooders I found a magazine rack packed with Mother Earth News and Whole Earth catalogs. Then a book on the top shelf caught my eye: Fine Woodworking Biennial Design Book. I gently lifted it down from its perch, opened the cover, and the images on the pages jarred my senses like nothing I’d seen before. The latent dream of becoming a creator of wooden things exploded from those pages. Although at that time the book represented a big expenditure, it followed me home and changed my life.
From the introduction page of that book I learned that Fine Woodworkingmagazine existed. The first issue that I bought, Spring 1978, had an article written by A.W. Marlow about ball-and-claw feet that I was intrigued with. The article not…
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