Going through my workshop library and figured I'd write up some recommendations from among my favorites.

Shaker Inspiration

Christian Becksvoort

I've got assloads of books by professional fine woodworkers on how to make a chair but very few on how to even begin to make a living making chairs. You don't, really, but this covers a lot of the practicalities and is imo much more interesting for it. once you've got your basic fundamentals of construction down designing the thing is the fun part you wanna do yourself.

Woodshop Dust Control

Sandor Nagyszalanczy

The first thing anyone thinking about using power tools in an enclosed space should be worrying about because holy shit is it a hassle to retrofit around an existing layout or clean up the giant hazardous mess that will form almost immediately without proper dust collection. The ideal solution is something like garage with big port doors to the outside + leaf blower but failing/in addition to that this'll help plan around a central collector and all the venting that requires.

Shop Drawings for * Furniture

If you do want a guide on how to make a chair I recommend Bob Lang's Shop Drawings books, which provide full blueprints of some really nice designs that are doable with not much more than a table saw and a general familiarity with which end of the blade to not stick your face in.

Copper Work

Augustus Rose

A decorative/arts-focused guide to Victorian and Arts and Crafts period redsmithing (hitting non-ferrous metals with a hammer, vs. the more industrial machining and casting processes below). There are very, very few people left who do this with any degree of proficiency, but you can get some really cool effects this way and the same principles apply to jewelry and silversmithing.

Build Your own Metalworking Shop From Scrap

David Gingery

More or less the standard for lunatics, the name is fairly descriptive. Start with a box of sand and a bag of doorknobs and gradually industrialize your way up to a milling machine, just like Factorio but sweaty and the neighbors are calling the cops. The most immediately useful part is just the book on foundry-making; this definitely isn't the easiest way to get a lathe (let alone a good one) and I'm not sure anyone actually follows this whole book cover to cover except for the bragging rights, but it's a fair reference for odds and ends and the knowledge that you can do all this stuff

Production Processes: Their Influence on Design

Roger Bolz

A two-volume, primarily metal-focused primer on the quirks of all forms of casting, cutting, welding, stamping, bending, and finishing; and how to plan around them when making a piece. It's from the 50s so concepts like laser cutting and 3D printing don't apply, but all the same machining stuff translates whether it's on a CNC bed or not and books that give a workable explanation of how to make a die that won't stick without devolving into huge tables of numbers that mean nothing without a terminal engineering degree are rare and precious. Great for the dilettante manufacturer, or someone who got too deep in the Gingery guides and wants to actually make something with the factory they've converted their home into. Production Processes: The Productivity Handbook covers and expands on much of the same material, and is available online.

The Colouring, Bronzing, and Patination of Metals

Richard Hughes

A huge book of recipes for turning silver and copper alloys any color of the rainbow, mostly using a handful of reactants you can find on eBay. Can be combined with the techniques above for some intensely cool effects for relatively cheap. Worth keeping in mind that a lot of the more out-there verdigris finishes are pretty fragile and won't stand for regular handling though.

Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction

George Bain

Reverse engineers the processes used in the elaborate kinds of knotwork seen in stuff like the Book of Kells. I've been working for a while on inlay designs that cross over between those and highway interchanges but tbh I'm mainly including it here for the great 'the fools at the academy laughed at me, but I'll show them all!' style ranting throughout the book that non-STEM guys rarely get to indulge in