Do you want to keep up with the latest ideas in contemporary furniture design? Here's the perfect way to explore 100 inspiring pieces that will spark your imagination and help you discover your next furniture-making project.

Fine Woodworking Design Book Eight is the latest volume in our popular series highlighting the most innovative pieces in contemporary furniture design -- all selected by a juried panel of woodworking experts.

Where earlier editions in this series were simply a catalog of woodworking projects, Design Book Eight features fewer examples but offers detailed descriptions of each piece, profiles of the craftsmen who made them -- and lots of fascinating information about their creative process.

Complete with current examples of high-quality custom and production furniture, this 176 page book showcases the finest tables, cabinets, chairs, bookcases, desks, chests and accessories being made today -- with 250 high-quality full color photos and 20 illustrations.

(Virtually all of the content in Design Book Eight has appeared in one of our special newsstand publications, entitled Furniture: 102 Contemporary Designs.)

Designed for anyone interested in contemporary wooden furnishings -- whether you're a hobbyist, furniture maker or high-end aficionado -- this special collection is like having a virtual gallery delivered straight to your door.

If you're passionate about elegant, well-designed, hand-crafted furniture, here's a beautiful, museum-quality book that will inform and inspire you.

Introduction

Tables

Beds

Seating

Desks

Case Goods

Accessories

Production Furniture

An Exercise In Design

Contributor Index

Photo Credits

It has been more than a dozen years since Fine Woodworking magazine published Design Book Seven, the most recent in a series that periodically explored contemporary woodworking. As was the case with its predecessors, this last iteration included a little bit of everything -- not only chairs and desks and beds but also carvings and sculpture, even a hand-cranked wooden toy. It was a compilation of the best and most imaginative work that came to the attention of editors at Fine Woodworking.

In the interim, The Taunton Press launched and eventually folded Home Furniture, a magazine devoted to furniture design, not construction. Although Home Furniture never quite managed the circulation it needed for long-term survival, its demise left many woodworkers wishing there were more opportunities to look at current work. So, late last year, Fine Woodworking Publisher Anatole Burkin decided the time was right for an updated version of the Design Book series.

There would be several changes between the old series and its offspring, what first became Fine Woodworking Furniture: 102 Contemporary Designs published last fall as a magazine, and now republished in book form as Design Book Eight.

For starters, Design Book Eight is limited to functional furniture, meaning that turnings, sculpture, musical instruments and the like would not be included. How come? We wanted to reach the greatest number of furnituremakers with design ideas that would be useful in their own work. We also decided to limit the collection to contemporary pieces. In making that early decision, we realized we would be excluding the many talented furnituremakers who turn out first-rate period reproductions. Yet we hoped it also would keep the collection more focused and more accessible.

With those loose ground rules in place, we encouraged furnituremakers to send in their best work -- and send they did. Once submissions were all in (a half-dozen large cardboard boxes worth) they were reviewed by a group of four: Anatole Burkin; Helen Albert, executive editor of Taunton books; and two former editors at Fine Woodworking, Jonathan Binzen, now a consulting editor, and me. All of us are woodworkers. Jessica DiDonato from the Taunton books staff provided the considerable editorial assistance the project required.

Readers with some of the early Design Books in their libraries may remember that each piece was accompanied by a simple caption listing the basics: name of the maker, name of the piece (if it had one), materials, dimensions. We thought it would be interesting to include more this time so we sent questionnaires to each of the artisans who had been selected and asked them to tell us about themselves, their shops, how they worked and what they had in mind with the design of the piece or pieces we had selected. Their answers were variably rich with detail, painfully short or something in between. But in any case, it was an opportunity for these artists and artisans to explain in their own words such things as how they arrived at a design, why they used a certain kind of wood and what their shops and work schedules are like. It has been an opportunity for us to peer into their creative train of thought. When you see a direct quote from a maker, that's where it comes from. One thing that hasn't changed, though, is the quality of the work you'll find in these pages. As you'll see, there's still plenty of that.

Scott Gibson

Customer Reviews from Amazon

Fans of period furniture may be disappointed by Design Book Eight's focus on contemporary furniture design, but the book gathers an impressive portfolio of contemporary work organized by category (tables, beds, seating, desks, case goods, accessories, and production furniture). Works by Gary Rogowski, Kevin Rodel, and Thos. Moser share pages with many lesser known makers, and the approaches and construction techniques described are as varied as the contributors. The text accompanying the lush photography varies in utility, but the sources of inspiration suggest avenues for further reading. Design Book Eight is not a how-to manual, but more advanced woodworkers will find it useful as they consider their own designs.

I recommand this book. It has a nice collection of useful furniture and good descriptions.

A new design book from Taunton Press continues a long tradition of Fine Woodworking documenting the Studio Furniture movement. Lots of good pictures and interesting commentary from makers; good for collectors, aspiring makers and students. Nice addition to design and craft section of your library/bookshelf.

I was disappointed because a lot of the furniture in here has been covered in other places, most notably in a magazine produced by FWW about 6 months ago. I've seen probably seen half of the furniture in other publications.

However, if you've never seen this furniture before, you will be quite happy if you like contemporary styles. The authors decided that the book would cover new styles and not cover old styles that have been covered in many other places.

Some of the pieces have sidebars regarding construction techniques and others are sorely lacking in detail (a point that is acknowledged by the authors). The photos are superb but several pieces would benefit from having multiple views of the piece shown.

In conclusion, I pre-ordered this book because I really enjoyed volumes 1-7. But when I read this book, there was a huge sense of deja vu because this furniture has been published before. Actually, the more I think about it, I'm really quite disappointed in the re-hash of their magazine from six months ago.

BTW, the book focuses on furniture and shies away from stuff like musical instruments, abstract art and boxes.

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