Book Review: The Seven Essentials of Woodworking

Anthony Guidice’s The Seven Essentials of Woodworking (Sterling, 2001) stands out among woodworking books. For one thing, it’s short. At a slender 114 pages, it’s more compact and direct than any other book I’ve read about general woodworking (and I’ve read a few). Guidice divides his book into seven logical chapters where he covers bread-and-butter topics like tool selection, sharpening, and joint making. Each chapter is well-illustrated with color photographs and clear line drawings. 

The information presented is also accurate and useful. When I read a book about woodworking, the author is usually more knowledgeable than I am, and Guidice is no exception. He’s clearly a master woodworker and could swamp his book with technical details if he chose to. But when he covers a topic like joint making, he keeps it simple and focuses on the mortise and tenon. The techniques he recommends are similar to things I’ve read in other books, but I can tell that his approach would be efficient and yield a good result.  And even though he acknowledges that there are many useful joints in the world, he argues that they are all basically variations on the mortise and tenon and that learning this joint will pave the way for all the others. It’s a persuasive argument.

Probably the highlight of the book is the chapter on saws. Following the footsteps of Tage Frid, the author recommends the bow saw for nearly all woodworking operations. He claims that backsaws are clumsy, inefficient, and difficult to keep up. On the other hand, even a high quality, pre-made frame saw is cheap, lightweight, and easy to maintain. 

This is the chapter I found most useful. I own a bunch of backsaws, but most of them collect dust because they are time-consuming and tricky to restore. I don’t currently own any frame saws, but I’ll be building some in the near future. According to Guidice and many other authors, the frame saw can handle heavy cuts for breaking down stock, and a small model can cover all of the joint making that would usually take a handful of expensive backsaws. If frame saws really are this effective and cheap, then every cash-strapped woodworker in the world should be using them. I’m certainly going to give it a try.

Guidice’s book is just as useful on many topics, but he falls into a common trap. Guidice is so confident that his approaches are the best and the quickest, that he comes off as arrogant and dismissive. For instance, he loves frame saws so much, he entirely dismisses all other saws. Given the millions of woodworkers who have used hand saws, panel saws, and backsaws, it seems like they must work pretty well. Declaring all of these saw clunky and inefficient is hard to support.

Guidice is even worse on the topic of planes. He confidently declares that all used planes are too much trouble to restore and are incapable of taking a really fine shaving. Instead, he recommends a set of Lie Nielson planes that cost $900 (and that’s when the book was written, in 2001).

This is where I really take issue with his approach. All of my planes are vintage Stanleys and they work really well. I’ve used Lie Nielsen planes before, and they are excellent, but I’ve never found them good enough to justify the cost, especially when there are so many vintage planes just waiting to be restored and put back to work. But, Guidice claims, these planes are poorly made, guaranteed to be destroyed by rust, and are impossible to flatten without the help of a machine shop. This is where things get downright bizarre, because any idiot with a flat surface and a piece of sandpaper can flatten a plane. I’ve done it dozens of times and checked my results with precision tools. It’s very possible. 

I feel like I understand where the author is coming from. If you’ve been woodworking for a while, you’re going to develop a set of techniques that work really well, at least for you. After a while, these techniques come to seem like the only way. Everything other people do is just…wrong. 

But this viewpoint is silly. Settling on one set of techniques and declaring it “the best” ignores all the variables other woodworkers deal with. Someone might have different physiology than the “expert”. Some woodworkers are very small and an increasing number are women. These people need access to different techniques that will work better with their bodies. Many woodworkers also just don’t have a lot of money when they get started. If I had to spend $900 just on planes to get going with woodworking, I never would’ve made anything.

In the end, I do recommend that you read The Seven Essentials of Woodworking because it’s short, it’s cheap, and it’s packed with information. There are a number of used copies available on Amazon, and that’s a good thing, because like so many other books that claim to teach you the “essentials,” Guidice’s book is out of print.