The Craft That Survived by Being Slow

The first thing a workshop will tell you is how long a panel takes. The second is that this is not a complaint.

For most of the twentieth century the slowness was the problem. It priced the work out of the market it had been made for, and successive generations of the trade watched cheaper imitation arrive — pressed sheets, printed grounds, transfers — and take the middle of the market away.

Then the slowness became the argument

What could not be imitated was the irregularity. A pressed pattern repeats perfectly. A cut-and-fitted one does not, and cannot, because each piece is trimmed to the gap it is going into. Held at arm's length the two look alike. Held at reading distance they do not.

So the trade retreated to the only ground it could hold: work that is bought by people who will look at it closely, for a long time, and who know what they are looking for.

The craft did not survive by getting faster. It survived by finding the customers who wanted it slow.

The workshops that remain are small — usually a family, occasionally an apprentice who did not leave. Their problem now is not the market. It is that the apprenticeship is seven years, and seven years is a long time to ask of anyone who has other options.