2024/2025 Award of Distinction Honoree
The Furniture Society is excited to announce John Kelsey as a 2024/2025 Award of Distinction honoree.
John’s award will be presented at a luncheon ceremony during the Furniture Society’s 2025 in-person conference (location and date TBD). Additional regional events are being planned for the Fall of 2025.
John Kelsey has spent 50 years writing and editing books and magazines about woodworking and furniture design. But in the 1970s Kelsey almost became a furniture maker instead, until his skills as a newspaper journalist pushed him back into publishing, to specialize in unexplored terrain.
“In the beginning everything we wrote about was new, we could open windows for woodworkers everywhere,” Kelsey recalls of his eight years as Fine Woodworking magazine’s first editor in chief. “We were riding a cultural moment, there was huge interest in crafts.”
John Kelsey Balustrade
Cypress wood, white paint / 2021Classically proportioned caryatid-style wood-turned balusters, 118 of ‘em, plus pillars and handrails at my home in Lancaster PA. Turning multiples offers meditative craft practice.
John Kelsey BDB1 cover
1977As Fine Woodworking magazine approached 100,000 subscribers, the publishers invited readers to send in photos of their best work in wood, with this black-and-white book the eye-popping result. No-one had seen a range of work like this before.
John Kelsey Cambium Booksellers
1995-2004After visiting international publishing shows and craft publishers in Europe, Kelsey started a mail-order bookseller specializing in woodworking, furniture making, boat building, instrument making… 1,500 pertinent titles in stock with in-person bookselling setups at ten furniture and craft events each year. Then Amazon rumbled through.
In 1974, at the height of the drop-out-and-go-back-to-the-land movement and after 10 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, Kelsey had decided to make a new career of his woodworking hobby. He enrolled that autumn in the School for American Craftsmen at Rochester Institute of Technology, one of the very few colleges that taught furniture making. The young journalist found it an exhilarating immersion and naturally kept notes, sketches and photos. “I wanted to open a cabinet shop, make tables and chairs, and maybe I could make a little side money writing, though who knew where to publish — there weren’t any pertinent magazines and not many books either,” he recalls.
Meanwhile, the Connecticut businessman Paul F. Roman was moving on his own career change from corporate executive to magazine publisher. Taunton Press was his new venture, and his big idea was Cabinetmaker’s Journal, soon renamed Fine Woodworking. Roman needed material, RIT was a good place to look. Kelsey wrote for the first issue and every issue for years thereafter, soon began editing articles so Roman could concentrate on the fast-growing business, and within a year was named FWW’s editor-in-chief.
This turn derailed Kelsey’s furniture-making plans and set him on his long career as writer, photographer, editor, publisher, and bookseller specializing in all things wood-making. After FWW, highlights included establishing Threads magazine in 1985, founding Cambium Press publishers and the specialist bookseller Cambium Books in 1995, and launching the Furniture Society’s Furniture Studio series of books in 1999.
John Kelsey Cambium Press Publishers
1995-2006After leaving Taunton Press in 1992, Kelsey founded Cambium Press book publishers, with a focus on woodworking and furniture-making titles.
John Kelsey Furniture Studio series
1999-2007Five books edited by Kelsey with Rick Mastelli and a variety of FurnSoc members, with Andrew Glasgow as FS executive director and funded by Windgate.
John Kelsey FWW 5 Stacking
1976After a series of visits to Wendell Castle’s workshops in Scottsdale NY, Kelsey wrote a major article on the technique of stack-laminating for furniture, with an excellent sidebar on his design process by Castle himself. Studio furniture and contemporary techniques like these had not been widely explained before.
“While my career was focused on helping others write and publish about their craft work,” he hastened to add, “none of it would have been possible without remarkable teams of people notably including my sons Morgan and Ted Kelsey and daughter Jennifer Campbell; the late Paul F. Roman who was Taunton Press founder and publisher; editorial colleagues Rick Mastelli, Laura Tringali, and David Sloan; designers Roger Barnes, Deborah Fillion, Peggy Bloomer, and Maura ZImmer; and adventurous publishers including Phil Macdonald of the American Association of Woodturners and Andrew Glasgow of The Furniture Society. Among many many others.”
John Kelsey FWW Staff Circa 1984
FWW editorial and art staff in spring of 1984. From left: John Kelsey, the late Jim Cummins, Nancy Stabile, Dick Burrows, Linda Whipkey, David Sloan, Deborah Fillion, Rick Mastelli, Paul Bertorelli, and the late Roland Wolfe.
John Kelsey turning for furniture 1976
Kelsey left newspaper journalism to attend the School for American Craftsmen at RIT, where this photo was taken. As a furniture maker he would have specialized in turning, and today, in retirement, Kelsey has returned to the lathe-centered workshop.
John Kelsey FW 24 back cover Maruyama & Bennett
“In September 1980 Fine Woodworking’s back cover published photos of seminal work by Garry Knox Bennett and Wendy Maruyama, presenting the fundamental art-vs-craft question to a mass audience of woodworkers. Predictably it drew dozens of letters-to-the-editor and to this day I meet old guys who want to talk about it. Looking back it seems ridiculous but at the time, outside of art school, it was unthinkable to mar those pristine surfaces.”
“Some years later I confirmed that Bennett did not stride up to the cabinet with hammer in hand to drive that nail. He whacked a few practice nails into scrap, then removed the door and clamped it to the bench. He told me, “Hey, I could always make another door.” Later still, after the original bent nail had disappeared, Bennett secured its replacement with tightly wrapped wire.”
“I’ve been lucky,” Kelsey says today. “I was in the right places at pivotal moments, with the skills needed to get stuff done, plus a lot of help from other crafts artists with stories of their own to tell. It’s been a long and bumpy ride, but a ton of fun.”
And what of being named one of the Furniture Society’s 2024 honorees? “I was flabbergasted, just blown away, and humbled. Over the years I’ve worked with more than half of the past honorees, they are my heroes. To sit among them, what a gift!“
Kelsey worked for Taunton Press, publishers of Fine Woodworking, Fine Homebuilding and Threads magazines, for 17 years, 1976 thru 1982. After that freelance editorial work on books and magazines across the woodworking and crafts domains, for clients that included GMC Publications (UK), Linden Publishing, Rodale Press, American Association of Woodturners, and The Furniture Society. He founded and operated Cambium Press from 1995 until 2006 and published titles that included David Pye’s two books on design and workmanship, Stephen Hogbin’s ‘Appearance & Reality,’ and Robert W. Lang’s collections of measured shop drawings for Craftsman-era furniture and accessories. In those years the Connecticut-based business also operated Cambium Booksellers, specialists stocking 1,500 titles sourced worldwide on woodworking, furniture making, boatbuilding, and related subjects broadly defined. “During the Furniture Society’s early years we set up bookselling kiosks at the annual conferences,” Kelsey recalls. “Good way to meet a lot of people.”
John Kelsey Nine cherry bowls 2023
Cherry wood, Osmo top oil 8" × 8"“Another meditative exercise in the workmanship of risk, you make the largest then fit successively on down. If you break one you could always make another, if there’s any more of that wood…”.
John Kelsey Tina's olive ash desk 1999
1999“Just to demonstrate there was a time I made a few bits of furniture”.
As Fine Woodworking magazine approached 100,000 subscribers, the publishers invited readers to send in photos of their best work in wood, with this black-and-white book the eye-popping result. No-one had seen a range of work like this before.
Learn more about John: