Drawer Slips
The 18th century—a time when human hands were set to work in order to create the objects of material culture; when men and women by their sweat and ingenuity wrought wares in the latest fashions; when the cabinetmaker, toiling away in dusty corners of the world, rode at the vanguard of improvement and progress.
Over the course of that century, anonymous workers of wood trained their planes and chisels on many problems, perhaps none so unassumingly complex as that of making drawers. Their search for elegant and durable methods of affixing bottoms, in particular, led them to one of the final developments in the art of crafting fine drawers by hand: slips.
Drawer slips—slender pieces of wood glued to the sides of a drawer and grooved to accept the bottom—have remained largely mysterious, especially to those of us on American shores. But the time has come for the light of history to shine once again on these milestones of human thought and hallmarks of careful craft smanship.
IN THE BEGINNING
The earliest drawer bottoms were little more than boards nailed to the underside of
