Woodworking publications have gotten hard to track down with all the defunct magazines and digital archive debates flying around. As a woodworker who grew up with ShopNotes on the workbench, I have real appreciation for what that magazine represented — practical, shop-tested content that was genuinely useful rather than aspirational. Today, I’ll share everything I know about ShopNotes and how to access its back issues.
What ShopNotes Was
ShopNotes was a woodworking magazine focused almost entirely on shop furniture, jigs, fixtures, and techniques — the infrastructure of a good woodworking shop rather than glamour projects. It ran from 1992 until it ceased publication in 2014. The back catalog remains one of the most practically useful collections of shop-building content ever published, which is why woodworkers still actively look for it more than a decade after the last issue.
Why the Back Issues Still Matter
The content in ShopNotes doesn’t expire. A well-designed router table fence from Issue 23 is still a well-designed router table fence. The magazine’s focus on fundamental shop problems — dust collection, tool storage, workholding, jigs for common operations — means nearly everything in those 132 issues is still relevant. I’m apparently a “save the back issues, refer to them constantly” person and that habit always works better for me while trying to reinvent shop solutions from scratch never does.
Legal Ways to Access ShopNotes
The Woodsmith Shop Library (woodsmithlibrary.com) provides subscription-based digital access to the complete ShopNotes collection. This is the legitimate, supported way to access the full archive — the content creators get compensated and the files are properly formatted and searchable. Physical back issues also appear regularly on eBay and Amazon from collectors who accumulated them over the years.
These are the paths worth taking. The content is valuable enough to pay for, and supporting the people who created it matters to keeping quality woodworking content economically viable.
The ShopNotes Legacy
ShopNotes shaped how a generation of woodworkers thought about shop organization and fixture building. Its influence shows up in how serious hobbyist woodworkers approach their shops today — building before buying, designing jigs for recurring problems, thinking about the shop as a system to be refined over time. That’s what makes ShopNotes endearing to woodworkers who worked through it: it treated readers as capable of building good solutions, not just purchasing them.
