Not the author you quote, but Christopher Schwartz, who runs Lost Art Press (which printed what you quoted) can also write a heck of a wood-working book:

"The journey to the summit of Mount Vesuvius has all the romance of visiting an unlicensed reptile farms..." - opening line to _Ingenious Mechanicks_, which is a history of early workbenches.

(One thing I found fascinating about this book is that it uses religious art to infer details about workbenches, because Yeshua Bin-Maryam was thought to be a "carpenter", and medieval artists drew contemporary medieval workbenches in pictures of the child Yeshua.)