Wooden Tablet or Cookbook Stand

This stand is about as small and fast a build as this catalog offers — three boards, glue, and brad nails, finished in one sitting. The back support piece is genuinely the only board that needs careful bevel work: one end is cut at 30° and the other at 40°, two different bevel angles on the same short board, which is what gives the stand its lean and its base contact angle simultaneously.

Attach the two 1x2 side rails together first, forming the shallow trough that holds a tablet or a cookbook's spine, then attach that assembly to the double-beveled back piece. The final step is simple but worth doing by eye rather than trusting a single fixed measurement: measure and mark out the support location against your actual tablet or book before final attachment, since screen sizes and book thicknesses vary enough that a support position tuned for one may not balance another.

This is a genuinely good project for scrap 1x8 and 1x2 offcuts, and a fast, useful gift.