#HTE

Tools & Craft #26: Unusual Books on Business That Craftspeople Will Enjoy Reading

I’m pretty clueless as a businessman; my background is in tools, computers and mechanical engineering. So I read a lot of books on sales, marketing, and running a business. My favorites are first-hand accounts, and the old books are the most interesting to me.

Right now I’m reading “Forty Years of Hardware” by Saunders Norvell. It’s about his career selling Simmons Hardware starting in the 1880’s first on the Kansas frontier and then later in Denver, and then onto other adventures. It’s a great read—I am learning a little on marketing and sales but also lots about business in the 19th century. A lot less has changed than you might think.

“Memories of a Sheffield Tool Maker” by Ashley Iles was a major guide when I first started. Years later when I finally met Ray, Tony, and Barry Iles it was great to tell them how inspiring I found their father’s book. The details and specifics of making tools and running a mail-order business are very different now, but on the basic theory of selling and growing a business, a lot less has changed than you might think.

“The Modern Hardware Store” by Carl W. Dipman (1929) was not only interesting, but the pictures of hardware stores in the heyday of hand tools excited me. A lot less has changed than you might think.

You’ll have to track those books down on Amazon, eBay or a library. But not the next one, which is the most unusual of the lot: Daniel Defoe’s “Complete English Tradesman Vol. 1 and 2” (free to download on Project Gutenberg). Published in 1745, it’s one of the first, if not the first, guides in how to run a store. The author was THE Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame, who by trade was a milliner (a bad one apparently) and every time he needed money he wrote a book. The book is really interesting with early lessons on double-entry accounting and sections on how to treat an apprentice - teach them the trade but make sure that the customers don’t get too used to dealing with him, so when he leaves his indentures he won’t steal your customers. He also mentions that you should teach your wife the business so that if you die she will be able to carry on the business and not have to marry your shop foreman or lose the business or sell it for pennies.

A lot less has changed than you might think.

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This “Tools & Craft” section is provided courtesy of Joel Moskowitz, founder of Tools for Working Wood, the Brooklyn-based catalog retailer of everything from hand tools to Festool; check out their online shop here. Joel also founded Gramercy Tools, the award-winning boutique manufacturer of hand tools made the old-fashioned way: Built to work and built to last.