Goodman's British Planemakers

This new fourth edition by Jane Rees is greatly enlarged from the previous edition. The first part has been expanded and largely rewritten and gives a clear explanation of the use and development of plane types. There is much information on how they were made and the plane making industry over three centuries.
The directory section is now almost double the size of the previous edition. It shows a huge amount of new thorough and accurate research carried out over a number of years.
This book is an essential guide for all tool dealers and auctioneers, assisting them in preparation of sale catalogues and inventories. Plane collectors, students and researchers of woodworking, together with social historians, will all find this book invaluable.–David Stanley
Congratulations to Jane Rees. The long-awaited Goodman’s British Planemakers4th Edition is finally at hand.

With all the new tools for research, Jane Rees has almost doubled the number of entries. You must remember that when the third edition was written there was no Internet or the many search engines now available.

Even more significant is the knowledge of the regional working clusters of planemaker and apprentices. No longer are we looking at the individual but the significant interconnection between these craftsman. It brings the trade of planemaking in England alive.–Tom Elliott, author of The Guide to the Makers of American Wooden Planes

How many collecting subjects are there in which you can pick up for a pound or two, at a boot fair or a country auction, an 18th-century artefact with a maker’s mark, whose date and place of origin can so easily be checked in British Planemakers? And there is always the possibility that a box of scruffy-looking old tools may contain a really early plane - one by Robert Hemings or Francis Purdew, perhaps.

The seasoned collector, on finding such a plane, will rush home to consult British Planemakers, to see how the new acquisition fits in with the known details (is it an early or late name stamp, or perhaps a previously unrecorded one?). The tyro may not realise that he has discovered a ‘gem’, until Planemakers reveals all. Even if Planemakers shows that a plane is actually quite common, the information provided about the maker and his family and trade connections (or hers - some plane-making businesses were carried on by widows) will be fascinating.

Goodman’s second edition was greatly enlarged, and the third edition, by Mark and Jane Rees, advanced the subject by several stages. This new version takes us even further, and includes makers who were in business before 1700. That date has accordingly been removed from the title. This is no minor revision; one of several statistics thoughtfully provided by the author is that there are 2417 planemakers who have now been identified (there were 1325 in the third edition). Thus a collector armed with the new edition will have 1,092 more names to look out for. This is a book no plane collector, tyro or seasoned, can be without.–Christopher Proudfoot

Jane Rees has had a long-term interest in the history of tools and trades. She trained as an architect and ran her own practice specializing in the restoration and renovation of historic buildings. This developed an interest in traditional construction techniques and tools used in centuries past.

After retiring as an architect in 1991, this interest became the main focus of her life, and she researched and wrote about numerous aspects of historic tools and trades. With her late husband, Mark, she wrote a number of books including the third edition of British Planemakers; Tools, A Guide for Collectors; Christopher Gabriel and the Tool Trade in 18th Century London; and The Rule Book, as well as reprints of the 1787 Sheffield Directory and the nineteenth-century Catalogue of James, Isaac and John Fussell.

She is president of the Tools and Trades History Society in Britain and for many years was editor of its newsletter and journal, as well as editor of The Tool Chest of Benjamin Seaton, 1797. She is a long-time member of the Early American Industries Association and in 2006, wrote A Pattern Book of Tools and Household Goods, a reprint of an 1820 pattern book. She has been a regular presenter at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s annual symposium Working Wood in the 18th Century.

When not writing and researching the history of tools and technology, she is a successful wildlife photographer and is an Associate of The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. She lives in Bath, UK.

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