[pliftkl]

Not the author you quote, but Christopher Schwartz, who runs Lost Art Press (which printed what you quoted) can also write a heck of a wood-working book:

"The journey to the summit of Mount Vesuvius has all the romance of visiting an unlicensed reptile farms..." - opening line to _Ingenious Mechanicks_, which is a history of early workbenches.

(One thing I found fascinating about this book is that it uses religious art to infer details about workbenches, because Yeshua Bin-Maryam was thought to be a "carpenter", and medieval artists drew contemporary medieval workbenches in pictures of the child Yeshua.)

[WillAdams]

As a counterpoint, he has a background in magazines, which is often at odds with producing books.

Yes, I'm still upset that I purchased a copy of:

https://lostartpress.com/products/virtuoso

and found it rife with errors (they mis-spell Henry O. Studley's name on the inside front cover), including a duplicated photo (a pair of flat pliers is shown a second time where instead there should be the iconic pair of jeweler's pliers) --- see the excerpt:

https://lostartpress.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/virtuoso_ex...

(which also shows the naïve typesetting of dimensions and that uni-directional quotes are used where primes should have been).

Any reputable book publisher would have issued a cancel for the photo, and no decent composition house would have set dimensions thus.