Things to Make

How to make a joiner's bench, a house ladder, a poultry house, a bicycle shed, kites, a water motor, a harmonograph and a hundred other things, with drawings and the actual dimensions. Archibald Williams wrote engineering for boys at a time when the tools were in every household and nobody thought a child should be kept from them. The instructions assume competence and give it back. Sixty plates of painting from 1815 to 1918, among them work by Adolph von Menzel and John William Waterhouse, catch the same hand-minded world of traps, shepherds, and wandering shows that these projects once belonged to.