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The Complete Woodworker
Bernard E. Jones (ed.)
The Complete Woodworker is a hand-tool bible, first assembled around 1917 by the English technical editor Bernard E. Jones and kept in print for over a century because nothing has really replaced it. Jones edited the great Edwardian trade journals, and the book carries their unfussy, practical authority: how to saw, plane, chamfer, cut a mortise-and-tenon, glue up, miter, and finish, all explained in clear steps and more than a thousand engravings. It assumes no power tools and no shortcuts, which is exactly why a later generation of hand-tool woodworkers rediscovered it. Ten Speed Press reissued it in 1980, and it has been reprinted many times since. For anyone learning to work wood the traditional way—or simply curious about how furniture was made before electricity—it remains one of the most useful single volumes you can own, a genuine reference rather than a coffee-table gesture.
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The editor
Bernard E. Jones (b. 1879) was an English practical mechanic turned technical editor at the turn of the twentieth century, presiding over Cassell's Work magazine and its allied "Workshop" series. He edited rather than authored: the book distills the accumulated know-how of working tradesmen into an orderly whole.
The book
First published around 1917, The Complete Woodworker is organized as a course in hand-tool joinery, moving from tools and their care through the fundamental operations to finished projects, illustrated throughout with clear line engravings. Its virtue is completeness at a practical level—it tells you not just what to do but how.
How it has aged
Remarkably well, because its subject is fixed: the properties of wood and the logic of hand tools don't change. The 1980 Ten Speed reissue introduced it to the modern craft revival, and it remains a standard recommendation for beginners committed to traditional methods.
For more context
Read alongside the Lost Art Press reprints of Jones's four-volume Practical Woodworker and Charles Hayward's manuals, which share its no-nonsense, bench-tested spirit.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Bernard E. Jones (ed.)
- Publisher
- Ten Speed Press
- Year
- 1980
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Craft & How-to
- Location
- Maine