Vintage Craftsman Radial Arm Tool Know-How Manual, Sears, 1961

The Piece

A shop manual bound in bright red flexible vinyl over a plastic comb binding, printed front and back in black. The cover shows a man in rolled shirtsleeves running a board through a radial arm saw, drawn in the confident commercial line of early-sixties American advertising art, under the Craftsman wordmark in its notched banner. The back carries a second drawing of the same man at the machine from the other side.

Inside it is a working technical book, not a pamphlet. Densely set pages of instruction run alongside photographs of hands on the machine and line diagrams of jigs and setups, covering crosscutting, ripping, mitre and bevel work, dado and moulding cutting, and the accessory heads that turned the saw into a shaper, a drill and a sander.

The vinyl has stayed supple and glossy with the colour undimmed, the comb binding is complete and turns freely, and the text block is clean and square. There is light scuffing and a few small marks to the covers and some edge toning to the paper.

History & Provenance

The title page settles the date with no argument required. It reads CRAFTSMAN RADIAL ARM TOOL "KNOW-HOW", REVISED 1961, copyright 1961 by Sears, Roebuck and Co., a Midwest Technical Publication, printed in U.S.A. The rights address is given as Legal Department 766, Sears, Roebuck and Co., Homan and Arthington Aves., Chicago 7, Illinois.

That address is worth a second look, because it confirms the printing independently. Chicago 7 is a postal zone, from the numbering system the Post Office introduced in 1943 and retired in July 1963 when ZIP codes replaced it. A book addressed that way was set before the changeover, which agrees with the 1961 on the page above it.

The radial arm saw is the machine this book was written to sell and to explain. Sears pushed it hard at the postwar homeowner as the one tool that could be a whole shop: crosscut saw, rip saw, dado head, shaper, drill press, disc sander and lathe, all hanging off a single motor on an arm. That promise is why these manuals are as thick as they are. A man who bought the machine on a Saturday needed several hundred pages before he could use half of it, and Sears wrote them.

The Homan and Arthington address is the old Sears complex on Chicago's West Side, the headquarters and mail order plant that ran the largest retail operation in the world for most of the twentieth century.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a book that works as an object. That red is a saturated, unembarrassed commercial red of a kind nobody prints any more, the cover art is genuinely good mid-century line drawing, and at this size it holds a shelf or a coffee table on its own rather than needing to be one of a stack.

It reads well face out on a shelf, propped on a workbench, framed open at a diagram, or stacked with other red and black spines. And it is still a usable manual. Anyone who owns an old Craftsman radial arm saw will want it, and anyone who does not will pick it up anyway for the drawings.