The third book in our series "The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years." This book covers all types of woodwork joints, including how to design them, cut them and fix them when things go awry.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the book “Woodwork Joints” by Charles H. Hayward (1898-1998), which was first published in 1950 then reprinted many times and in several different editions of varying quality.

The compact 168-page book is beautifully illustrated by Hayward and contains the kind of spare prose that made him the best woodworking author of the 20th century. Like a good woodworking joint, Hayward’s text contains nothing superfluous and lacks nothing important to the task at hand.

Every illustration from “Woodwork Joints” had appeared in The Woodworker magazine, where Hayward was editor from 1939 to 1967. So as we read every magazine issue from those years for our book, we marked and scanned every magazine article on joinery to make sure we captured everything that could have ended up in “Woodwork Joints.” We almost succeeded.