The Cabinetmaker’s Account

"I suspect that historian Jay Robert Stiefel, author of this extraordinary book, knows more about Head than the cabinetmaker himself knew. Stiefel has been analyzing and dissecting Head’s life and career for more than 20 years now. This magisterial publication is the culmination of hi work on Head and his account book, giving us a detailed, thorough, contextual, and sophisticated look at nearly everything that this important document reveals. Stiefel tells us much about Head’s life in particular, but also about the cabinetmaking trade and social history of life in Philadelphia during the first half of the 18th century."—Gerald W. R. Ward, Maine Antique Digest

"There’s no question that Jay Stiefel has produced a remarkable book, one that satisfies on many levels: as an historical account of commercial activity in early eighteenth-century Philadelphia; as a study of one cabinet maker’s life and business; and as a detailed analysis of the furniture which can now be ascribed to the workshop of John Head … [Stiefel’s] discovery of the parchment-bound account book in 1999 amongst the archives of the American Philosophical Society was a eureka moment for him and for furniture studies. Here was a detailed record of 35 years of a cabinetmaker’s workshop, covering a period where no comparable record exists in America or in Britain, found by a man whose experience, knowledge and passion could have been made for this opportunity."—David Dewing, Regional Furniture Society