teristic medieval flavor as the text.[2]

Joseph Moxon in his well-quoted work on the mechanic arts defined
joinery as "an Art Manual, whereby several Pieces of Wood are so fitted
and join'd together by Straight-line, Squares, Miters or any Bevel, that
they shall seem one intire Piece." Including the workbench, Moxon
described and illustrated 30 tools (fig. 3) needed by the joiner. The
carpenter's tools were less favored by illustration; only 13 were
pictured (fig. 4). The tools that the carpenter used were the same as
those of the joiner except that the carpenter's tools were structurally
stronger. The axe serves as a good example of the difference. The
joiner's axe was light and short handled with the left side of the
cutting edge bezeled to accommodate one-handed use. The carpenter's axe,
on the other hand, was intended "to hew great Stuff" and was made deeper
and heavier to facilitate the squaring and beveling of timbers.[3] By
mid-18th century the craft of joiner and carpenter had been completely
rationalized in Diderot's _Encyclopedie_ and by Andre Roubo in his
_L'Art du menuisier_, a part of Duhamel's _Descriptions des arts et
metiers_. Diderot, for example, illustrates 14 bench planes alone,
generally used by the joiner (fig. 5), while Roubo suggests the steady
sophistication of the art in a plate showing the special planes and
irons required for fine molding and paneling (fig. 6).

[Illustration: Figure 5.--1769: THE BENCH PLANES OF THE JOINER increased
in number, but in appearance they remained much the same as those
illustrated by Moxon. (Denis Diderot, _Recueil de planches sur les
science et les arts liberaux_, Paris, 1769, vol. 7, "Menuiserie."
Smithsonian photo 56630.)]

Despite such thoroughness, without the addition of the several plates it
would be almost impossible to visualize, through the descriptive text
alone, the work of the carpenter and joiner except, of course, in modern
terms. This is particularly true of the numerous texts on building, such
as Batty Langley's _The Builder's Complete Assistant_ (1738) and Francis
Price's _The British Carpenter_ (1765), where building techniques are
well described but illustration of tools is omitted. This inadequacy
grows. In two 19th-century American editions of British works, _The Book
of Trades_, printed at Philadelphia in 1807, and Hazen's _Panorama of
the Professions and Trades_ (1838), the descriptions of the carpenter's
trade are extremely elementary.