The Toolemera Press
 

"How unfortunate it is that we must so often wait until something is gone before appreciating it or even being aware of it. Generations of Essex (Massachusetts) people were born, lived and died amid the sounds of the shipyards: the caulking mallets, the sound of the axe and adze ringing against white oak, the millions of hammer blows, and the shouts of men. At the time it was part of their existence, like the air they breathed. Now that it is all gone we realize what a satisfying chorus it was and how silent the town is now."
Frame-Up! The Story of Essex, It's Shipyards and It's People.
By Dana Story. 1964

That about sums up my thoughts on books and ephemera.

About

Welcome to the online home of The Toolemera Press and Toolemera ePrints. What, you ask, is Toolemera? A bunch of years ago I started selling books and ephemera about tools, trades and technology on the Oldtools eMail list. There was the occasional catalog reproduction too. In the middle of the night I had an epiphany... henceforth I would sell under the name Toolemera. You get the idea: tool + ephemera, etc., etc.

Who Am I? Not the Jackie Chan movie (and it was not one of his better movies either). Gary Roberts, Living In Dedham with my wife Amy and two Maine Coon Cats, Merlin and Casey. It's a smallish farm house built around 1920 and added on to many times over the years. Which means we have almost no closet space. And we're both collectors. Which presents a problem when it comes to storage. But we're working on it.

By day I pass the time by working in the library of an engineering research laboratory. In real life, along with being a husband and cat-person, I collect, study and enjoy old tools and related books and ephemera. Also old books in general and the occasional non-oldtools piece of ephemera that strikes my fancy. We watch lotsa movies. Currently we are into anime. Well, I am learning about it from Amy, who is the cinema and anime maven in the house. The cats don't care so long as they are fed, scratched and have a soft bed to sleep in. Casey did enjoy The Life Of Birds.

Woodworking planes are a particular passion of mine, although peculiar tools of whatever sort will catch my attention. And Books. And Ephemera. Lately my collecting interests have morphed into a concentration on ephemera and images of long past tradespeople. You'll find a preponderance of woodworking related material here because because that is what interests me. Here and there some other item will sneak in but I really can't substantiate the why's or wherefore's ... It just happens.

That brings us to this endeavor. Within this site will be selections from my collection. There will be an occasional item from another person's collection, with appropriate attribution. I've tried to draw the fine line between image resolution, download time and legibility. If something doesn't cut the mustard, let me know. In general, I scan all material at 150 or 300 dpi, descreened as needed, 24 or 8 bit color (rarely 48 bit) for archival purposes (backed up on Taiyo Uden DVD discs), then resampled and resized as needed in Photoshop Elements, Graphic Converter or Preview. Acrobat 7 is my choice for creating PDFs. Yes, this is primarily a Macintosh endeavor. An Intel Imac loaded with BootCamp for a Windows XP partition serves to run an Opticbook scanner, a very nice piece of equipment when it comes to scanning books for OCR. Otherwise, I use an Epson 4490 Photo scanner with SilverFast SE Ai, a Microtek i800 scanner, also with Silverfast Ai software and a Fujitsu fi-5110EOXM ADF scanner. Ok, so I have a few too many scanners.