Nick Offerman works wood and wants converts

“Good Clean Fun” by Nick Offerman (Dutton, 344 pgs., $35)

It’s a shame that comic actor Nick Offerman wasn’t around last weekend for the Louisville Area Furniture Society’s show. As his third book indicates, the star of TV’s “Parks & Recreation” would be drooling over what our local artisans and craftspeople brought to the Tim Faulkner Gallery. Offerman does not, it seems, go in for half-measures: He’s practically obsessed with woodworking, he wants to celebrate the like minds he brought into the process of building his custom-furniture-and-more side-business, and he wants readers to understand and catch his enthusiasm.

Dive into this book, and there’s no question that he’s committed to making his case. In this season — the last 10 weeks before Christmas, when it is a regular event for celebrities to flog coffee-table books they had a hand in developing — Offerman will visit The Clifton Center and show off a researching, writing and bookmaking project of amazing depth.

This isn’t to say that every page has something for every reader. The in-depth profiles of the shop’s employees and specialty-consultants get to be a bit wearing. But are you going to begrudge Offerman the occasional interruption from his entertaining, carefully photographed instructions for projects including a kazoo, canoe paddle and complete, seemingly-complex bedframe? We’re all being invited to join in with the gang, and to see how a few of these new friends of ours produce gorgeous lamps and tables. Each piece is unique but reliably solid, from methods that have been established over generations but occasionally employ cutting-edge tools and bizarre quirks. (Speaking of which — the audio version of the book includes song collaborations between Offerman and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy.)

There’s time for recipes in this book of woodworking — because after you’ve celebrated these tutors and masters and fellow travelers, wouldn’t you want to share a cookout with them? And whether you do, or don’t have time, pause long enough to take in Offerman’s lengthy introduction. It’s as well-structured as any table project to come out of his shop: balancing his personal and professional history with his deepening and expanding love for woodcraft for fun and (after years of practice) profit. He’s reinforcing and building upon a classic American boy-with-treehouses story, with sidelights covering appreciation for stage-prop production, lust for ever-more-precise tools and the Zen wisdom found along a long road where avocation matters as much as vocation.

Yes, this book is thick. It is way too thick, if what you’re in for is a souvenir that dishes out Offerman’s brand of rugged-guy humor, presented as the punctuation in a guide to cutting, sanding and finishing some coasters for the home bar. The author sees a genuine calling in what he does, but also in how he writes about it. He wants converts. He starts a chapter by saying he’s no wood scientist — and then demonstrates a mastery of research that shares enough knowledge to get the reader far along toward achieving that profession.

What is even more interesting — and what will keep his book on my shelf — whether or not I ever again approach lathes, like the one I dreaded in middle-school shop class — is how Offerman gets his book to include subjects like his love for Wendell Berry. With a Berry quote as a highlight of the introduction, and then in a chapter recalling a project that brought overlap to the worlds of the Kentucky poet-philosopher and the Chicago actor-woodworker, Offerman shows that he can work on the grain of a patient reader’s mind and bring out some wonders — much as he does with the woodcraft he loves so well. •

This article appears in October 26, 2016.