Shaker legacies pt. 1

This is part one of a two-part series by Sam Wells on the late furniture maker Thomas Moser.

Thomas Moser died in March 2025 as America's preeminent furniture maker, and was memorialized as such. His New York Times obituary described a "Woodworker Whose Chairs Were Works of Art", and the Washington Post placed him in the pantheon of American studio furniture pioneers with George Nakashima and Sam Maloof (seen here doing something you should not). This assessment elides a more complicated legacy, and denies his real achievements, which were as an entrepreneur, industrialist, and marketer, someone whose greatest success, ultimately, was as a self-mythologist.

Thos. Moser, founded in 1972 in New Gloucester, Maine and recently acquired by a holding company, employs more than sixty people in their factory in Auburn, Maine, and sells 10,000 pieces of furniture a year. These numbers coexist with the claims that each piece "takes two months to make" and that it is "hand-made by a single craftsman," but one might question what that exactly means when the video shop tour shows stacks of parts being shaped on a five-axis CNC mill (2:41 of video), and the huge press that instantly cures glue with radio waves.

In 1977, Thomas Moser published his first book, How to Build Shaker Furniture. This is legitimately a great book, and only contains faint seeds of these later contradictions. It serves as a manifesto of sorts, a concise history of the Shakers, a thorough introduction to woodworking, and a guide to building a whole range of furniture.

Newsletter continues below

Subscribe to Prune for just $1 a month