Stickley Magazine Stand

Before I began building Arts & Crafts furniture I collected Arts & Crafts furniture, and I came to know two key facts about magazine stands: One, they are surprisingly useful pieces of furniture in the modern home that allow you to store books in any available cranny in a room. And two: All of them wobble like a drunken sailor.

This defect is the result of the fact that they have no back, which actually happens to be one of their most charming features. If you place a lamp on top of any magazine stand, the light will flood behind the cabinet and illuminate the wall behind your books, pottery and most-favored objects. And this backlighting, as any photographer will tell you, is positively enchanting.

Here you can see the side and pattern clamped up for routing. When making this cut, move the router clockwise around the opening. Move quickly and smoothly, and try not to hesitate at any point during the cut. This will reduce the chance of scorching the edge.

So the best way to fix this design defect is definitely not to add a plywood or solid-wood back to the piece. So what do you do? After some contemplation and experimentation, we found the solution: Two narrow strips of wood under the top two shelves. These “shelf supports,” as we call them, are then screwed to the sides of the case, making them anti-racking devices that are usually invisible. And with the assistance of the two wider stretchers below the bottom shelf, this magazine stand will stay rigid for a long time.

The other bit of engineering in this project is the joint that attaches the shelves to the sides. Dados are the traditional (and best) way to ensure the weight of your book collection doesn’t create enough downward force to ruin the unit. Dados, however, do almost nothing to prevent a case from racking, which is where the shelf supports and stretchers lend a hand.

Every good cabinet is a careful balance of these attributes. If you ignore the engineering when designing a project, you run the risk of it dying an ignominious death at the curb of a fraternity house some day. The other sin – almost as serious – is to overbuild a project with unnecessary reinforcement. When you do this, you could be wasting lumber or hardware that could be used in another project. You also could be adding bulk to a project that would benefit from less weight. And you could be pumping up the visual chunkiness of the project by beefing up parts that would look better when slimmed down.

This harmony between function and form is an important component of any project, but it is something to be particularly mindful of as you build Arts & Crafts furniture. Furniture in this style was intended to integrate itself into the turn-of-the century family home.

Harmony Begins in the Wood
There is very little lumber in this adaptation of Gustav Stickley’s No. 79 magazine stand; about 15 board feet of white oak would do the job if you’re lucky. But when you have so few parts in a project, you should pay close attention to the quality of the boards that will show. Of the nine parts, you should be concerned with three: the sides and the lower stretcher at the front.

The two common types of pattern-cutting router bits are shown here. The bit at the top has the bearing above the cutting flutes, which is designed for blind cuts. Below that is a bit with the bearing at the end of the cutter, which I prefer for this operation.

With these three parts you should select boards that show the most dramatic figure. Be willing to waste a few pieces of wood to get it. And be happy to make a couple extra cuts to get the coloring correct and the seams in the right place. To do this, here’s what you need to know.

When I started working with quartersawn white oak, I had the fortune of visiting Frank Miller Lumber Co. in Union City, Ind. This huge high-tech mill supplies much of the world with quartersawn lumber. The employees are happy to sell oak by the board foot to the home woodworker and by the train-car load to furniture plants. If you’re ever driving through central or eastern Indiana, it’s worth a detour.

During my first visit, the guy who was picking our lumber could regularly grab boards with dramatic ray-flake figure on the board’s face by looking at the ends of the boards (which were painted brown, by the way).

Bemused, I asked him how he did it. He pointed to the annular ring pattern on the ends of the boards, which was visible under the paint. When these annular rings intersected the face of the board at exactly 90° – in other words, when they were straight up and down – the face of the board was more likely to exhibit the desirable ray flake pattern. Remember this the next time you’re at the lumberyard and looking at rough stock.

The trick to using a spokeshave is push it in the direction that will push the fibers down, instead of pulling them up, which produces tear-out. Think of the grain as the fur of a cat and the tool as your hand that pets it.

Once you pick a dramatic board for the lower stretcher, turn your attention to the sides. It’s unlikely you’ll find a perfect 10"-wide board in quartersawn white oak. They are pretty rare. That means you’ll need to glue up two narrower widths to end up with a 10"-wide side piece.

An easy mistake to commit is to make the sides by gluing together a wide board and a narrow one. This might be more material-efficient, but it probably won’t look good in the end. The better solution is to make each side using two lengths from the same board that are 5 1/8" wide each. By gluing up your side pieces from a single board, the result is likely to look harmonious in grain and color. Matching the color is easy; matching the grain is a matter of flipping the boards over and over on your assembly bench until the result looks good.

Personally, I like it when the grain looks like a “Y” that branches up from the center seam of the side piece. Also note that if you’re going to hand plane your parts that you need to pay attention to which way the grain is running on the two pieces. I usually mark an arrow on each face that indicates the grain’s direction. These arrows quicken the process of figuring out how to glue the boards together.

Routing the dados in the sides with the T-square jig ensures straight and clean dados that stop exactly where they are supposed to. It is an elegant solution to a thorny problem with case joinery.

Now you can joint the long edges of your boards. But before you crack open the bottle of glue, there is one small detour ahead.