01 · The Members Desktop
The working platform.
A members-only software platform built by and for period-furniture makers. Unified search across ten thousand museum objects (the Met, Winterthur, MESDA, Yale, Chipstone, Cleveland, the Art Institute, Rijksmuseum). Twenty-three hundred curated reference cards. The video archive with time-stamped chapters and searchable transcripts. The reference library of public-domain books, tool manuals, and member-submitted plans. A measure tool for working from reference photographs. A project workbench for your own build journals, and saved collections that travel with you.
02 · The Publications
A journal and a magazine, in print and online.
American Period Furniture (annual)
The Society’s flagship journal. Long-form, deeply researched articles on tools, techniques, design, and the history of the craft and its makers. Members receive each volume as part of their dues; the archive runs back to the first issue.
Pins & Tales (quarterly)
The Society’s quarterly e-magazine. Member activities, project write-ups, technique pieces. Published since 2008; back issues open to members, current issue preview open to visitors.
03 · The Reference Library
The books, the plans, the manuals.
Public-domain books on period cabinetmaking, digitized and searchable. A catalog of early-twentieth-century tool manuals. Member-submitted plans and technical drawings. A growing set of book reviews written by members. All of it inside the Members Desktop, alongside the museum search and the card catalog.
04 · Structured education
How we teach the craft.
SAPFM’s approach to education is not lectures about period furniture — it is building the very pieces members admire, study, and collect. The publications and the Members Desktop exist to support that work: to put reference, plans, and precedent into the hands of makers at the bench.