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IF YOU have been keeping abreast of developments in designing, furnishing and decorating the modern home, you must have noticed the increasing importance of cabinets, bookcases and wall shelves. They are now being used with great skill by architects and interior decorators to provide needed storage facilities and at the same time add to the attractiveness of practically every room in the house.

Fortunately, this type of furniture is not difficult for even the amateur to build. At relatively low cost for materials, a handy man or home craftsman can construct a variety of pieces that will have great utility and add immeasurably to the convenience of the household. At the same time, these pieces can be made to look so well that they will enhance the appearance of the rooms in which they are placed and lend them an individuality they might otherwise lack if furnished only with standard, factory-made pieces. In fact, such hand-made furniture, if carefully finished, often has an expensive custom-made look which can be duplicated commercially only at considerable expense.

Cabinets are best, in fact, when they are designed to suit the room and the space they are to occupy. They often, indeed, serve a dual purpose. More and more you see cabinets placed to act as room dividers . . . built high to form a storage wall or partition . . . designed to flank a fireplace . . . arranged to separate a dining area from living-room space . . . constructed to form an intimate conversation center . . . used to segregate any special area such as one used for study or for viewing television.

Because cabinets can be used in so many different ways, an attempt has been made in this book to illustrate a very great variety of designs. For this reason the designation, “cabinets, bookcases and wall shelves,” has been employed in its most general sense.

Cabinets are shown with and without doors and drawers and in both period and contemporary styles. Some pieces which are commonly called chests have been included, as well as other pieces often referred to as cupboards. Special-purpose cabinets for holding china, phonograph records and children's toys are described, as well as one type of rod-and-gun cabinet.

In the same way, the section on bookcases has been expanded to include magazine racks and baskets. And the designs for wall shelves include almost every imaginable kind, from small decorative brackets to shelving of substantial proportions. The collection of jigsawed wall shelves is one of the largest and best-designed to be published in book form.

In the unlikely case that a certain wall space is available and no project in this book is precisely the right size, you can usually alter the dimensions of one of the designs within reasonable limits to make it fit. If not, consider the possibility of making a multiple unit or constructing a central unit and flanking it with two narrower or corner units. Many modern cabinets are built in units which are intended to be assembled in various ways to suit individual needs; and several designs of this type are given.

It should be noted that kitchen cabinets are not included because they are in a class by themselves and have been covered completely in another book in this series, “How to Build Modern Kitchen Cabinets.”

The projects in the present book are the work of well-known and exceptionally competent designers. Many of the pieces were constructed in the experimental workshop of the Home Craftsman Magazine in order to check the accuracy of the drawings in every respect and also to enable photos to be taken to illustrate how various operations are performed.

The editor wishes particularly to acknowledge the help of Harry J. Hobbs, publisher, Arthur Wakeling, consulting editor, and Howard R. Berry, art director of the Home Craftsman Magazine. Among the many others who contributed designs are: Alvaro A. Altomare, W. Paul Breckley, F. D. Burt, L. A. Burton, Arthur Collani, W. J. Gee, Jr., William E. Glass, Jr., Franklin H. Gottshall, R. A. Gunerman, Seth Harmon, Russell C. Henderly, Jr., D. C. Marshall, Harrison Neustadt, Benjamin Nielsen, A. J. Price, Leonard S. and Myra Warner Rankin, E. H. Roberts, J. McKenzie Semple, Hi Sibley and Charles E. Troutt.

Milton Gunerman

Associate Editor, Home Craftsman Magazine