marc: ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of your favoritewoodworking magazines? i did. that's why we packed our bagsand headed out to connecticut for a visit to the oneand only taunton press.
fine woodworking magazine reviews, (upbeat guitar music) marc: well here we areat the taunton press, publisher of your favorite magazine and mine, fun woodworking.
it's a pretty cloudy, overcast, rainy day so we've got to hustle up and get inside before it starts raining. we've got some greatthings in store for you. let's go inside and check it out. taunton has a proud history,dating back to 1975. that's two years before i was born. that's a lot of magazinesbetween then and now. amazingly, it all startedin this humble little house.
who better to bring us up to speed on the history of the company than one of tauton's own senior team members. anatole: hi, i'm anatole burkin, publisher of fine woodworking. we're here in my shopin oxford, connecticut. well, the legend goes that paul roman was working for ge, and then he was also a amateur woodworker.
he just loved to craft, but he couldn't find much good information on woodworking. he decided to take a chance and start a small magazine with his wife, jen. they started this little magazine and it just expanded andgot bigger and bigger. before they knew it they had a full fledged publishing company. they started back in 1975.
it was a quarterly black and white. now it's at seven timesa year, full color. website, four othermagazines, books, videos. very successful company. marc: with over 300employees, 5 magazines, and countless books and dvds, the taunton press is indeed successful. after 30 years in a relatively slow moving industry like woodworking,
how does taunton keep things fresh? asa: i'm asa christiana. i'm the editor of finewoodworking magazine. that's a huge challenge. that's sort of one ofour biggest challenges. we kind of have a five year rule. that is, if we've covered a topic more than five years ago, wefeel like it's fair game. there's enough new woodworkers entering
the market that we can cover it again. we would have to because there is a finite amount of topics. unless you get so far outinto the esoteric margins of stuff that only a fewpeople would care about. we have kind of a five year rule. that said, when we do it again and we did it seven years ago, let's say, we better do a new twist on it.
certainly with a new authorwho's got a new take on it, and bring something new to the table. that's kind of how we get around that. marc: with this much woodworking history under their belts, this was aplace i just had to explore. let's take a whirlwind tourof the entire facility. david: one of the really nice things about the offices here at fine woodworking is the small gallery of reallybeautiful furniture we have.
all of which has been made by our authors for articles in themagazine over the years. everything from this very large entertainment center ini believe that's pear. we have a small desk with a slide out drawer for computer keyboard. very nice screen-and-green style table. another very lovely piece, small cabinet with some very beautiful hand-rot pulls.
yeah, beautiful pulls. round dining table, that was in the magazine not too long ago. two of my favorites. this is a recreation of thomas jefferson's traveling writing desk that launch lining, who is one of our long time authors, did after looking at the original in the smithsonian for just years and years.
we turn the piece around,you can see some very very, very thinpartitions, and some really tiny little v shaped dovetailsto hold it all together. i remember laun in the article was amazed that 18th century woodworkerscould get it that fine. look at the hand-done dovetails, yes. finally, we have a segmented turning that was done for our 25th anniversary. the reason it was donefor the 25th anniversary
is because a bowl exactly of this design was on volume one, number one. the very first issue of fine woodworking. one of our longtimereaders thought it would be really cool to do it all over again for the silver anniversary. we've published close to 200issues of fine woodworking. this is our library wherewe keep extra office copies of just about everyissue in that lineup.
some of the very early onesare kind of hard to come by. we're here in the biggestshop room at fine woodworking. kind of an all-purpose area where the editors from fine woodworking as well as from fine home building, build props for articlesthat need to be photographed. they build some of their own projects and occasionally will build something for an article start to finish.
it's a terrific space and very versatile. i think very well equipped. we've got a sanding stationthat we built ourselves. again, connected to it's own little shop vac for dust control. drill press, router table, and for people who are vertically challenged,hollow-chisel mortiser, big bandsaw, little bandsaw, wide planer, 12-inch jointer, smaller planer.
that gets a lot of use. that's running almost all the time. oscillating spindle sander, bunch of routers in various states of undress, and the sawstop table saw with an out feed table that we built. actually, we just rebuilt that one. again, this gets used forbuilding props for photographs. that wall of tool holders has
been in a numerable photographs. in fine woodworkingand fine home building. sharpening station, waterstones, some diamond stones. tormek slow speed grinder, and apparently a brand new bench grinder. that's good to see. we have a set of largeracks against one wall here where we can store woodthat's being used for props. it's also space for editorshere to keep their own projects.
marc: after a very enlightening tour, we set out to learn a little bit more about the process of creating an article. mark: hi, my name is mark schofield. i'm the managing editorhere at fine woodworking. one of the questions we get asked is, how do i get publishedin fine woodworking? the answer is that yousend a proposal to us. it can either come by mailor it can come in by email,
but what happens is they all come to me. i do the initial vetting. there's various factors that determine whether something would makea suitable article for us, or whether it would not fit the magazine. if i think that it would bea possibility of an article, what i do is i send it outto all the other editors. it's what's called a yellow jacket. we call them yjs.
it goes around and all the editors write their comments on the outside. you can see sometimeseverybody likes the article. with other ones, it's not so popular. every two or three weeks wehave an editorial meeting where we discuss theseand come to a conclusion. i would guess that i getprobably two to three a day. of which probably i would say three or four per week i actually circulate.
okay, thanks everybody forcoming to this yj meeting. the first proposal wehave is from garret hack on different ways to cut a bead. marc: it was really coolto watch this meeting. after mark introduces the article idea, the group brainstorms the topic and decides if it's a keeper. once the decision is made, the article goes to one of the editorial staff.
asa: what we have is kindof the best of both worlds. we get the ideas andthe info from outside, but we send our own staff, our own trained editors/photographers out to shoot those photos at the person's shop. the person writing for usdoesn't need to shoot the photos. that's a big misconception. people think when they submit and idea that they have to havethese magazine ready photos
and they're intimidatedbecause ours look so beautiful that's all because editors get on a plane with a portable light kitand umbrellas and a camera. this is what they do all the time. people are out of theoffice at least a quarter of the time travelingnorth america mostly to get these photos that you seeappear in the magazine. john: my name is john tetrault. i'm the assistant art director here.
basically the editor will go out to the author's shop and they'll get the story, bring it back into the office here. we get a package thatlooks something like this. we call it blue folder. we'll get a package ofphoto ins and photo outs. we have all kinds of goodies in here to chose from when we start to layout. i'll grab one of thoseand i'll read through
the articles and try to understand, get the grasp of it,and start laying it out. something like this, i'll take all the measurements from theactual plane we're building. i'll do a drawing to scale. it kind of makes it easier if we do send out the illustrationsto an illustrator. he has more of an ideawhat we're asking for. i'll scan these in, put them in the
article as things are getting laid out. this was kind of a funone for me personally because just to make sure everything was right as far as dimensions, i brought in some stock from home and went out to the shop and got to buildone myself, just to see. this is kind of what icame up with, my version. i'm still kind of workingon different handles for it. it's kind of a work in progress,but they work really well.
marc: now we all know aboutfine woodworking's magazine, but what about the online content? gina: hi, i'm gina eide. i work as an assistant editoron fine woodworking's website. the magazine, as soon as it's sent to the printers, that's when we get a pdf. i have to go through the pdf and i figure out which images i want to use to represent any given article.
then i start figuring out howto layout the article online. another cool feature is that we always try to use the technology of the web, to make any given subject,to add more depth to it. for example, we have this article by mark edminson on a bench. it was cool because online we can have a video on the cord seat. we can also have a finishing.
we have a text articlethat's only on the web. it's free; all these things are free here. mike: hi, i'm mike dobsevage. i'm in the video departmentof taunton press. i'm a video editor here. basically, editors go out in the field and they generally shootthe videos with the talent. we get the entire videosand we digitize them in. then edit them out sometimes to scripts.
sometimes we just use our own sensibilities and put the thing together. then we basically screenit for the producer of it. then we turn it into web video basically. into flash video andupload it to our server. marc: so you want ofyour very own articles published in fine woodworking magazine? anatole: a lot of people think it's difficult to get in the magazine.
it's true; it is difficultto get into any magazine. partly, it's just timing. making the right pitch at the right time. i tell people just keeptrying and send us your ideas. we want original ideas as well as time-tested things thatyou've done and tweaked. a lot of ideas in woodworkingare not brand new. they're ideas upon ideas;somebody's developed something. it's that little twist to anidea that you come up with
that can be the tip or the full lenghth article that we're looking for. just don't give up, keep trying send us your pictures and let us know. asa: we're basically looking for about a one page write up about,what is this process. it's usually going to be a technique. the first time you get in the magazine, it's some kind of a technique.
a finish you do. a way you cut a joint. how you do some specific thing you do that you think is pretty cool. a jig you made up. you just tell us about itin your on plain words. send a couple snap shotsor drawings, or whatever, that help us understandexactly what's going on. that's it.
don't invest too much init, but make sure we know through visuals, and yourdescription, what's going on. then be patient. we'll get back to you. you don't have to be a great writer. we'll help you with that. we'll polish up the language if we have to later on in the process. you don't have to shoot your own photos.
you'll get a visit from our staff. it's kind of fun. we take you out to dinner. we spend time together in your shop. that's a really funpart of the process too. marc: after seeing the whole process from start to finish,i was quite impressed at just how much work goesinto a single article. the fine woodworking staff clearly loves
what they do, and i thinkthe magazine reflects that. a big thank you to everyone at taunton for allowing us to invade their domain and share this informationwith our viewers. (upbeat jazz music) gina: but one of my main jobs... (laughs) marc: welcome to marc'shouse of table saws. we got so many table saws it's ridiculous. (laughing)
marc: how long have you had the sawstop? david: a little over a year. marc: how many times have you set it off? david: i've lost count. marc: we're here; the weather's... let's go inside. voiceover: you're lost. marc: am i lost; am i scared? voiceover: you're scared.
marc: am i all alonein the woods, starving?