"I suspect that historian Jay Robert Stiefel, author of this extraordinary book, knows more about Head than the cabinetmaker himself knew. Stiefel has been analyzing and dissecting Head’s life and career for more than 20 years now. This magisterial publication is the culmination of hi work on Head and his account book, giving us a detailed, thorough, contextual, and sophisticated look at nearly everything that this important document reveals. Stiefel tells us much about Head’s life in particular, but also about the cabinetmaking trade and social history of life in Philadelphia during the first half of the 18th century."
— Gerald W. R. Ward

"There’s no question that Jay Stiefel has produced a remarkable book, one that satisfies on many levels: as an historical account of commercial activity in early eighteenth-century Philadelphia; as a study of one cabinet maker’s life and business; and as a detailed analysis of the furniture which can now be ascribed to the workshop of John Head … [Stiefel’s] discovery of the parchment-bound account book in 1999 amongst the archives of the American Philosophical Society was a eureka moment for him and for furniture studies. Here was a detailed record of 35 years of a cabinetmaker’s workshop, covering a period where no comparable record exists in America or in Britain, found by a man whose experience, knowledge and passion could have been made for this opportunity."
— David Dewing

Jay Robert Stiefel is an authority on the crafts and commerce of Colonial Philadelphia. A native of that city, he studied history at the University of Pennsylvania and Christ Church, Oxford.

Stiefel’s writings and lectures on social history, and his appearances on streaming platforms and television broadcasts, such as C-SPAN’s American History TV, have restored to the historical record many early craftsmen, artists and merchants whose accomplishments had been obscured by the passage of time. For the publication of The Cabinetmaker’s Account, Stiefel was selected by the University of Oxford as its North American-based Alumni Author.

His other publications include: Rococo & Classicism in Proprietary Philadelphia: The Origins of the “Penn Family Chairs”; “All in the Family: Joseph Richardson’s Earliest Silver”; “Simon Edgell (1687—1742) ‘To a Puter Dish’ and Grander Transactions of a London-trained Pewterer in Philadelphia”; “Simon Edgell, Unalloyed”; "Barnard Eaglesfield: A Prominent Philadelphia Cabinetmaker Revealed”; “‘Beyond expectation, beautiful, graceful and superb,’ Inlaid Miniature Chests of the Philadelphia Circus, ca. 1793”; “Francis Martin Drexel (1792—1863), Artist Turned Financier”; “‘A Clock for the Rooms’: The Horological Legacy of the Library Company of Philadelphia;” and “‘On the Bowling Green at Oxford in ye year 1759’: A Newly Discovered Drawing by Marcellus Laroon the Younger.”