The Deep Elation of Working with Wood

December 2, 2024 / Billboard Lifestyle /

What do people do all day? My daughter loves to read Richard Scarry’s book of that title, though she generally skips ahead to the hospital pages. Once we’ve read about Doctor Lion, Doctor Dog, and Nurse Nelly four or five times, she’s ready to go back to the beginning. She never tires of studying the various professional activities of the residents of Busytown: Farmer Alfalfa and Grocer Cat, Blacksmith Fox and Captain Salty, homemakers and construction workers, police officers and firefighters, bakers and engineers.

The literature of work begins in childhood but doesn’t end there. Novelists have long attended to labor, from the mills of Charlotte Brontë’s “Shirley” and the mines of Émile Zola’s “Germinal” to the more recent portrayal of Target loading docks in Adelle Waldman’s “Help Wanted.” In the world of nonfiction, though, we regrettably associate work with how-to and self-help: the manuals that teach you to become anything from a mechanic to a movie director; the wikiHow pages that promise to make anyone, regardless of profession, capable of cleaning a P-trap, refinishing a floor, or replacing the coolant in an air-conditioner.

But there are also wonderful nonfiction books about work, above all by those who have dedicated their lives to specific types of it. I don’t mean political memoirs, which instrumentalize the past to secure votes or shape legacies, or celebrity memoirs and tell-alls, which forsake the bedrock of a vocation to examine its subsoil and topsoil, recording social scenes and settling scores. I have in mind books that dwell deeply on the nature and practice of work itself. Think of James Herriot’s account of life as a rural veterinarian, “All Creatures Great and Small,” or Reinhold Niebuhr’s reflections on parish ministry, “Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic”; Michael Lewis’s revelatory “Liar’s Poker” or Anthony Bourdain’s scandalous “Kitchen Confidential.” More recent books like this include Caitlin Doughty’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory,” Hope Jahren’s “Lab Girl,” Finn Murphy’s “The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road,” and Stephanie Land’s “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive.” Such memoirs provide the satisfaction of a surreptitious Take Your Child to Work Day, documenting in pleasing and illuminating detail what people do all day, but also why they do it. A charming new addition to this genre is “Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman” (Ecco), by the carpenter Callum Robinson.

Robinson was born to a schoolteacher and a landscape architect turned woodworker outside Edinburgh, in the eastern Lowlands of Scotland. For decades, his parents slowly restored the leaky-roofed, draft-prone eighteenth-century farmhouse in which he was raised, and he watched every evening as his father plastered, plumbed, and painted the dwelling, adding and repairing outbuildings as needed. Around the edges of all that, the elder Robinson made time to help his son craft wooden weapons: first, a catapult like the ones in “Ben-Hur,” hewn from solid pine and strung with bailing twine, and then a series of longbows, crossbows, and redwood swords that transported the boy from the age of Margaret Thatcher back to the court of King Arthur.

The family’s spread was not far from the North Sea, surrounded by barley fields and frequented by seagulls, but Robinson was drawn to the eerie forests of Sitka spruce just beyond their boundary fence: dense woodlands with ogreish trees that can grow to more than three hundred feet, which he remembers as being “wet and slimy underfoot, riddled with fairy-tale red blobs of fly agaric fungi.” If that makes Robinson sound like a nature writer, it’s because he is. Some of his best prose attends to the natural world, and to the way our manufactured world makes use of and mimics it. “The sawdust is granular and damp to the touch, like coffee grounds between my fingers,” he writes, while resin that is too old or cold can clump and require a day “spent picking the sticky uncured goop from a knothole—like digging toffee from a tooth cavity.”

As for trees, the necessary heart of his trade: they are lavished with even more attention than Robinson’s adored wife and beloved parents. His father’s landscaping work gave him a graduate-level education in botany at a young age. “It was the reason,” he recalls, “the trees we encountered were never simply oak, ash, or monkey puzzle, but Quercus petraea, Fraxinus excelsior, and Araucaria araucana.” He knows these species as well as many of us know our siblings. Oak, he says, is “heavy, sharp, and bristly. Its fibers catch and prickle like an old man’s stubble.” Elm is “the tenacious swaggering dandy of the forest.” Sycamores are “ghostly, almost luminescent,” and, like some kind of arboreal werewolf, “must be cut in the light of the full moon.”

When Robinson’s father was declared redundant at his landscape firm, he began making furniture to support the family. He started small, with picture frames, mirrors, doorstops, cutting boards, and key rings, but soon he was crafting bespoke cabinets and taking on full remodels. Callum, the eldest of three children—“surly, socially awkward, already close to six feet tall and with all the clumsy strength of the heavy-set teenager”—was enlisted as a helper and trainee.

Robinson apprenticed under his father, one of the few Master Carvers in the United Kingdom.

Rather than attend college, Robinson went to work as a bartender, then apprenticed for another five years with his father, making staircases, tables, “and a hundred other things besides.” At twenty-four, he took a walkabout in New Zealand, and later he came home to Scotland, where he met his wife, Marisa Giannasi, “whose particular mix of mountain Tuscan and East End Glaswegian makes her garrulous and gregarious, and entirely immune to fear.” An architectural designer by training, she paid their bills by teaching design and working at an architectural firm while Robinson developed his trade, built a client base, and assembled a tool kit befitting Hephaestus: mortiser, lathe, jack plane, spokeshave, thicknesser.

It’s a captivating marriage, not only of equals but of opposites: entrepreneurial and optimistic, Giannasi is a foil for Robinson, whose shyness and awkwardness can rattle the teacup in his hand at any trade conference or gallery opening. He struggles to strike up conversations with potential customers and seems reluctant to hand out his business cards. “From the moment we met, I’ve marveled at it,” he says of his wife’s ambition and social stamina. “She’s one of those rare people who doesn’t just talk about things, she actually gets on and does them. Formulate a plan, act on it. No fucking around.”

Together, Robinson and Giannasi eventually open Method Studio, a workshop specializing in sybaritic display cabinets, cases, and travel trunks for luxury brands like Burberry, Bentley, Hermès, and Estée Lauder. The couple advertise themselves as “architects of objects” and soon hire three other “makers” to help them. They refine and perfect their sales skills over the years, convincing an increasingly élite coterie to invest in their increasingly elaborate objets d’art, some of which take hundreds of hours to make and sell for tens of thousands of pounds. “The Royal Ballet’s performing at the unveiling,” they’re informed about a million-dollar watch for which they design a treasure-chest case, while the ornate, leather-bound trunks they make for a motor show come with surprising strings attached: “Perhaps you’d consider flying to Paris to fit them?”

But, when “Ingrained” begins, that work has abruptly collapsed. Readers are never privy to the identity of the corporate client who drops Method Studio or even the exact nature of what Robinson was designing for them, but, after months of courting what might have been a life-changing account, he fields a call notifying him, in vague management-speak, that the job has fallen through. “I’ve heard it said that miners working deep underground prefer wooden pit props to modern materials like iron or steel,” Robinson writes. “Timber lacks metal’s strength, but it creaks and moans if the load becomes too great. Wood warns you when it’s about to break, giving you a fighting chance to escape. The others simply crumple and your world caves in. I hear no warning, only a click, a dial tone, and the hammer-thudding of my own heartbeat.” Insofar as “Ingrained” has a plot, it tracks what Robinson and Giannasi do after that phone call, opening a retail shop in the suburb of Linlithgow, twenty or so miles west of Edinburgh, which they hope will generate enough sales to help them repay their overdraft and retain their talented employees.

As the book marches toward the shop’s opening day, Robinson offers some marvellous set pieces from his profession and his personal history. In one, he reveals that many woodworkers worry over l’appel du vide, or what his father calls Machine Tool Vertigo, which Robinson first experienced in a Tasmanian timber yard: “More often than I’d like to admit, when I see a bandsaw running, I feel a desperate and terrible impulse to sprint in from a distance, leap headfirst to meet the blade fully horizontal, and split myself right down the middle.” Closer to home, he recalls his father toughening him up by sending him into the forest to turn on a water line. Carrying only a parang and a T-bar, Robinson falls into a stream, is spooked nearly to death by a deer, and returns home twice in defeat, only to triumph in his third attempt, undeterred by the sulky teen-ager’s version of the pathetic fallacy: “Mud was deeper, branches were lower, spikier and even more vindictive, and the rain that had begun to fall found its way down the back of my neck with extraordinary precision.”

Extraordinary precision is Robinson’s forte: a necessary gift for his career, and a boon to his writing. In an account of creating a commissioned rocking chair, he writes, “A pair of one-piece sinuous sides, each built up from several smaller parts but sculpted with templates to feel like one smoothly transitioning component. Linked not by a footrail, but by slim braces and the chair’s angled wooden seat. The backrest, by client request, will be one great swathe of tensioned bridle leather.” He’s conjuring the blues music of Sonny Boy Williamson while sketching with a pencil, trying to imagine the design into being, considering how the materials might come together. “Leather like this will stretch and move over time, softening and slackening as it ages and molds to the client’s back, mellowing like an old shoe. Predicting the right tension, and allowing for adjustment, will be challenging. To tackle this, we have added buckling straps at the back, like corsetry. Something we hope will feel more like saddlery than S&M.”