Book Traces That Do-It-Yourself Impulse -- Home-Improvement History, Tim Allen Tools, Dremel Accessories Make Good Stocking Stuffers

It's 2 a.m., you're standing on a shaky ladder with a screwdriver in one hand and screws between your teeth, and you start to wonder. How did this happen? Why am I up here installing this light fixture instead of someone who knows what they're doing?

Some of the answers can be found in "Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th Century America," by Carolyn Goldstein (Princeton Architectural Press and the National Building Museum, 1998, $17.95). The book traces the origins of these impulses on the part of ordinary people to take up tools and tackle some "home modernizing" project to the turn of the last century, when the Arts and Crafts Movement made manual labor fashionable.

Manufacturers and retailers were not slow to recognize this vast new market, and magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens, House Beautiful, House and Garden and McCalls encouraged the trend with how-to articles and pictures of wondrous transformations. (Some of these transformations would horrify us today, such as the transmogrification of a lovely four-square Craftsman house into a fake typical Colonial.)

Magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Handyman encouraged such "home improvement" projects as paneling an attic, putting tile or linoleum on floors, and painting. With the end of World War II, the portable home tool industry took off, and handymen and handywomen never looked back.

The book concludes with the rise of the historic preservation movement in the '60s, when avid do-it-yourselfers began to reclaim neglected urban neighborhoods.

The book would make a great stocking-stuffer or gift for anyone who's ever whacked a thumb with a hammer or painted themselves into a corner.

Gifts for the handyman

That's right: It's not too soon to start thinking about gifts for the handy person around your house - even if that's you.

There's a saying among people who do a lot of sewing: "She who dies with the most fabric wins." A variation for do-it-yourselfers might be, "Whoever dies with the most tools wins."

Tim Allen, of TV's "Home Improvement," has just introduced a line of power tools to go with his previous line of hand tools. There's nothing funny about Tim Allen's Signature Tools; Allen was an industrial designer before he became a stand-up comic.

The new line includes three cordless drills, a jigsaw, a corded rotary tool and an orbital sander.

Allen's tools are noted for being user-friendly, and he donates a portion of the proceeds to educational and charitable programs for children.

Among tool aficionados, there is a faction totally devoted to their Dremels, a rotary tool that uses various attachments to perform an astonishing variety of tasks. If you have a Dremel fan on your holiday list, you might consider the new auto/cycle detail kit, a 22-piece set that polishes chrome and removes rust spots, among other things. The kit sells for $19.99 to $23.35.

Or there's the Dremel craft kit, with 56 of the most commonly used craft bits for such projects as etching glass, drilling holes in wood or nuts, or punching holes in thin aluminum. The craft kit sells for $14.99.