I actually want a book that might be called "Traditional Woodworking with Handtools"; one with no interest in collecting the tools, knowing their provenance etc., but rather organized around what I want to do to a piece of wood, with an explanation of what tools and procedure you'd do it with. The O'Reilly 'cookbooks' are doubtless my model. You'd think such a book would be useful and therefore popular and easy to find, but on the whole I find either books on specific projects, which I can sometimes take apart for their component techniques; or books on all the uses of one tool, ditto; or, like this, a book about many kinds of tools. This one is useful because, although it's organized by tool, it organizes the tools by purpose; and discusses them with enough practicality to summarize their use and jigging and sharpening.
Ah, sharpening, there's the rub. Clearly it makes plenty of people anxious, given the many this-is-how-I webpages (for which I'm often grateful). Traditional Woodoworking Handtools has a couple pages on sharpening cabinet scrapers, which make clear the results I want but not how the amateur-handed can get there. I might have put together an adequate jig for jointing a worn edge, by dint of borrowing a nice true piece of scrap titanium from my other half and buying a new undished stone; but putting the hook on is just beyond me, by hand. (And now you know some of what I've been doing instead of writing book-reviews, or indeed reading anything that requires thought.) Conveniently, Lee Valley makes a little device that purports to do the hook for you; today I'll see.
Also conveniently, scrapers are pretty cheap and often come with a nice edge, but treating them as disposable doesn't seem right.
Back to the book at hand; I think it would be delightful for a collector who also used the tools, and it's mildly useful for how-to purposes. There's one little oddity in the typesetting; the font is slightly old-fashioned (don't recognize it & can't find a colophon), and ligatures the 'st' and 'ct' letter-pairs. This looks wrong to me; it ligatures all of them, when I feel - suspect - that in the best typesetting ligatures have something to do with position in the word; and it doesn't ligature 'ft', which I just as nebulously feel really ought to be tied. Anyhow, I thought the effect on reading was more lumpy and precious than elegantly archaic.
Find in a Library
So wrote clew in Technology.