The Woodworker – The Charles Hayward Years

The Woodworker – The Charles Hayward Years – Paperback

Selected articles from The Woodworker Magazine .

There is little doubt that Charles H. Hayward (1898-1998) was the most important workshop writer and editor of the 20th century. Unlike any person before( and perhaps after) him, Hayward was a trained cabinetmaker and extraordinary illustrator, not to mention an excellent designer, writer, editor and photographer. As editor of “The Woodworker” magazine from 1939 to 1967,Hayward oversaw the transformation of the craft from one that was almost entirely hand-tool based to a time where machines were common, inexpensive and had displaced the handplanes, chisels and backsaws of Hayward’s training and youth.

While Hayward didn’t mind machines (he wrote the book “Light Machines for Woodwork” in 1952), he never stopped filling the pages of his magazine within formation on hand tools, joinery and finishing that is difficult to come by today,even with the Internet to help us. Hayward and his contributors took great pains to teach readers how to use these hand tools, whether it was a jack plane, a Stanley45, a metallic side-rebate plane or a quirk router. This sort of information was rarely written down, and much of it was lost in decaying magazines or cemeteries.

During the last eight years, Chris Schwarz and staff at Lost Art Press culled,organized, scanned, edited and re-edited these articles to create four excellent paperback volumes. This is not simply a quick reprint of old magazines. They reset all of the type, and scanned and cleaned every image. The entire project took a dozen people all over the country working several hundred hours.

The Woodworker – The Charles Hayward Years is produced and printed entirely in the United States. It is printed on smooth acid-free #60 paper and joined with a tough binding that is sewn,affixed with fiber tape and then glued.

The paperback volumes are organized as follows: