My Favorite (but Least Successful) Book: ‘Ingenious Mechanicks’

If I could write 10 more books like “Ingenious Mechanicks,” I would be a happy guy. The book is exactly what I thought I would be doing as a writer and woodworker: Find an ancient workbench or tool that has been forgotten (such as the Roman workbench) Travel to foreign countries to research these kinds of workbenches. Find that there is still a 2,000-year-old example in a museum basement Visit it. Measure it. Get to pick it up Build a reproduction and work on it to find out how it works. That is the script for “Ingenious Mechanicks.” But there’s more. We flushed thousands of dollars away trying to translate a 1505 Germanic codex on early workbenches. I went into a volcano (the one that destroyed the earliest known workbenches). And I got to sort through thousands of old paintings to gather the clues for how these old benches were used. “Ingenious Mechanicks” is one part travelogue and one part experimental archaeology. Add to that the fact that the low Roman workbench has never gone…

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