A rare and wonderful tool catalogue
This digital treasure is a bit different from the previous ones, as you cannot easily download the whole book, but the quality of the contents is so good that I could not resist including it.
It is from Austrian toolmaker Franz Freiherr von Wertheim, and was published, in French, in Vienna in 1869.
If I have understood the introduction correctly, this is in effect, a catalogue to accompany a display of tools which was shown at various big trade exhibitions, prepared as a sort of lavish reference book for students – with 45 plates, 18" by 24", containing 1081 pictures. It's a very rare book; only a couple of copies are known.
It shows tools for many woodworking trades – cabinetmaker, turner, cooper, wheelwright, carver, mechanic – and covers a huge range of specialised planes, saws, chisels and so on. Volume one is the descriptive text, Volume two is the illustrations. The original is in the collection of the University of Princeton, and Princeton's terms of use allow us to reproduce only a few images, in black and white, in our short-run, scholarly journal. I urge you to look online to see these and all the others in their proper lithographic colour.
For anyone with a wish to reproduce any of the tools themselves, the catalogue helpfully includes measured drawings!
(Thanks to US member Joel Moskowitz for writing about this on his blog, at
https://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/store/blog/375/title/1869%20Franz%20Freiherr%20von%20Wertheim%20Catalog%20-%20Now%20Online – which is where I first learned about it and where you can also learn that our own Science Museum used to own the exhibition display itself – but de-accessioned it and sold most of it off!)
Andy Tuckwell