"A book on cheap paper does not convince. It is not prized, it is like a wheezy doctor with pigtail tobacco breath, who needs a manicure."

— Elbert Hubbard

One of my prized possessions does nothing but make me angry.

It's an autographed copy of Kurt Vonnegut's "Deadeye Dick" that's signed: "And for Chris. Kurt Vonnegut." What ticks me off is that the paperback itself is disintegrating. The binding is falling apart. The pages are yellowing, fragile and feel like they are disappearing into the air.

I'm almost afraid to pick it up and read it. And it's one of my favorite books.

When we publish a book here at Lost Art Press, we want to make sure it outlives us. We use acid-free paper; we get the book's signatures sewn and glued. We use thick boards covered in cloth.

And now we've gone over the top.

When we sent "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker" to the printer in Pennsylvania, we asked to keep any leftover copies from the print run without the hardback boards. We got a few boxes of these spineless book guts, and they have been sitting in my basement since November.

Recently I took some to the Ohio Book Store in downtown Cincinnati, which has a binding division that specializes in restoration work and creating fine volumes for libraries and private collectors. The work of the three restoration specialists there was superb, so I asked them to finish these books like a mid-19th-century volume.

The result is beautiful.

What you see here in the photos is aged calfskin on heavy boards with marbled endsheets. The spine of the book is shaped to give it a nice curve, much like high-quality vintage books. The cover and spine are hand lettered in gold.

It is a delight, both to look at and read in this form.

We've asked Ohio Book to bind 26 of these books like this, which we'll offer for sale here and on the Tools for Working Wood web site. These books will be signed by me and Joel Moskowitz (the other modern author of the book). They will include the DVD, which will be glued into a sleeve at the back of the book. And each book will be lettered ("A" through "Z") and marked with the year, 2009.

The book should be available in a couple weeks, so save your pennies. Price: $165.

Believe me, this isn't about making money. The profit margin on this kind of hand work is pretty slim. But because we thought that offering a vintage binding on this important book would be a cool thing for our libraries, we thought you might feel the same way.

So if "Joiner and Cabinet Maker" ever does become one of your favorite things (and it's fast becoming one of mine) you can be sure that it will be around long enough to also become a favorite thing of your grandchildren.

— Christopher Schwarz

"Hand-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hand-covered book to a friend and when he doesn't return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different."

— John Steinbeck

As our supplies of Joseph Moxon's "The Art of Joinery" began to diminish this year we had to decide if we were going to reprint the book or simply let it disappear like the previous editions of this landmark woodworking text.

Reprinting a book is expensive and it would probably take us 10 years to recoup our investment on a second press run. So we decided to take a third path: a downloadable e-book.

So for the last two months I've been revising and expanding our 2008 edition into something that you will find useful to have on your computer.

This 147-page electronic book is in pdf format, so you can read it with Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program. You can search the entire text by keyword. And you can jump to any of the sections in the book using embedded bookmarks.

If you already own the printed version of "The Art of Joinery," do you need this digital edition? Probably not – unless you are intensely curious about early woodworking practices (like we are). Here's what you'll find in this revised and expanded digital edition:

• The complete text from Lost Art Press's original "Art of Joinery" book, including the lightly edited original text (we eliminated run-on sentences and replaced the "long s" character with a modern Roman "s"). The text has also been revised to fix typos, plus it reflects new information we've learned since 2007, including details on Moxon's workbench.

• New images from the same time period. It's been widely reported that Moxon's plates were taken from André Félibien’s “Principes de L’architecture...” (1676). We reproduced nine full-page plates from Félibien's book so you can compare for yourself. We have also included five tool illustrations adapted from Randle Holme's "Academy of Armory" (1688). While we don't possess rights to the original images, we had five of them reproduced in detail by an artist and present them here so you can see what Holme calls a Tennant saw.

• The 1703 text from "The Art of Joinery" in a very close original form. This includes the odd spellings, run-on sentences, the long "s" character and the other peculiarities of 17th-century English. We reset the text in Times New Roman and kept it as close to the original as we could. The only thing that's not reproduced are the italics Moxon included.

You can order this instant download now from the Lost Art Press web site for $7. After your checkout process is completed, you will be taken to a special page where you can download the file with a single click. You'll also receive a confirmation e-mail with a specially coded link to the file.

The file is about 5 megabytes, so we don't recommend it for dial-up customers.

If you have any technical problems, you can send an e-mail to sharon@lostartpress.com, who will make sure you get your download in a timely manner.

To thank everyone who has ordered a copy of "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker," we'd like to offer you this free deluxe SketchUp file of "The Schoolbox" – the second project in the book.

This file was made by Randall Wilkins, a set designer in the film industry who uses SketchUp in his job and in his woodworking hobby. This file is extremely cool. Here are some details.

Wilkins has added additional scenes (click on the tabs at the top of the file) that will create shop drawings for you in a variety of views, including some helpful section views. All the surfaces have a nice wood grain pattern on them. And the box's lid is now a dynamic component – which means it will open and shut with a mouse click. Here's how to do that:

In Sketchup, go to View/Tool Palettes/Dynamic Components, a new tool palette will open. Click on the little hand and then touch the box lid. It will open and close again on the next click. This will work from any view. Wilkins created these drawings because he is planning on making a copy of the schoolbox for each of his daughters. But he also graciously allowed us to share it with you.

Don't have SketchUp? You should. It's a free download from Google. To download the file, click on the the link below. You might need to unzip it before you can use it.

DLSchoolbox.zip (481.03 KB)

Thanks for all your help in making this book a success, ensuring we can make more new books like it.

All the best,

Christopher Schwarz

Now you can pre-order a copy of "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker" signed by me. By pre-ordering the book today for $29 (plus $5 shipping in the United States), you'll get one of the first copies of this landmark new woodworking book. But, in true Lost Art Press fashion, you will not be charged (or even asked for a credit card number) until the book is available and ready to ship.

In other words, you cannot lose.

Click here to visit our pre-order form. Click below to download an excerpt of the original text (it's different than what is posted at Tools for Working Wood).

Preview_Joiner_&_Cabinet_Maker_LAP.pdf (998.55 KB)

Or read on....

Right now we're making the final arrangements with the printer, but the book is complete and we're just waiting for some time on a printing press. I'm trying to get back to my normal life, and I'm sure that Joel Moskowitz at Tools for Working Wood is doing the same thing.

If we were dumb enough to conduct a true tally of hours Joel and I spent on this book, plus the money for the wood, hardware, finish, a few critical woodworking tools and scanning services, then our wives would surely ask us to take up a more-profitable sideline, such as selling our plasma.

But believe me, we're not complaining. This book was tremendous fun for us to piece together, from the very early stages of researching the original text of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” to the eight full months of poring over old texts, building and writing that followed.

The real reason we published this little book is because we were both so excited when we first read the text of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” that we wanted to share it with other woodworkers who were as enthusiastic about history and hand-tool woodworking as we are. You are the people who sustain us in our day jobs. You buy tools from Joel at Tools for Working Wood and Gramercy Tools. You buy magazines and books from me at Popular Woodworking, Woodworking Magazine and Lost Art Press.

And after many years of working with our customers, we were certain that you would find the contents of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” as thrilling as a beach novel.

Within this small and obscure 1839 book is the direct evidence for how many day-to-day tasks were executed in an 18th- and early 19th-century English workshop. Told through the tale of a fictional lad named Thomas, it is a remarkable account of many aspects of the apprentice system and how basic skills were conveyed. Here is a sample:

• Dovetailing: See exactly how the joints were laid out, cut and assembled, including 19th-century advice on fitting the joint that should prove helpful to 21st-century woodworkers.

• The basic toolkit: By modern standard, the projects in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” were built with surprisingly few tools. Discover what the core kit is and how to stretch your tools to accomplish more.

• Case construction and vernacular furniture forms. The three projects presented in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” aren’t high-style urban pieces. Instead, they are simpler forms with less ornamentation that look surprisingly contemporary. However, the three projects in this book form the backbone of cutting traditional case joinery by hand and are the foundation for every form of furniture, from Shaker to Rococo.

• Tool-buying decisions. Find out how 19th-century craftsmen purchased tools. Did they scrape by and improvise, did they purchase the most expensive tools available or did they perhaps choose a third path?

Is “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” the Rosetta Stone of early woodworking? Hardly. There still are many unanswered questions about how some basic and many advanced operations were performed. The book doesn’t even mention moulding planes or carving, for example.

But this book is an excellent place to begin – both for hand-tool woodworkers who want to commence their journey and for experienced woodworkers who want a sense of how their ancestors were trained to work so productively. Our edition of this book begins with a chapter written by Joel that provides a snapshot of England and the state of woodworking in the 19th century. That’s followed by the original text, which we have reset in a larger font but left otherwise unaltered. Joel has provided footnotes throughout the original text that will help explain the significance of what you are reading. Next are chapters that I wrote that detail how to build the three projects. He also compares the techniques in the book with hand-tool techniques that have either developed since then or simply aren’t discussed in "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker."

The last section of the book is quite useful. There you will find some conclusions, a chapter on how the different editions of the original “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” were printed and bound, plus a list of other useful books on history and hand-tool woodworking.

We encourage you to read this entire book and attempt to build the three projects using hand tools. That is a tall order, we know. However, building the Packing Box, the Schoolbox and the Chest of Drawers will unlock the basic skills needed for all hand-tool woodworking, and it will offer insights into how traditional, high-quality casework was really built.

Click here to pre-order the book.

Click below to download the Lost Art Press excerpt.

Preview_Joiner_&_Cabinet_Maker_LAP.pdf (998.55 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

Thanks to expert mousing and clicking of two readers, you can download free construction drawings of the 2008 version of the sawbench featured here last week.

Louis Bois, the draughtsman who prepared the construction drawings for the “Workbenches” book, and woodworker Mike Lingenfelter have both submitted electronic files that will allow you to easily build this sawbench. Plus, Louis’s file also has plans for a mate for the sawbench – I call it “Little Buddy” – that will nest under the “Skipper.”

Louis’s file is a pdf and can be printed out by a wide variety of free programs, most notably Adobe Reader. Mike’s version is a SketchUp drawing that is actually a 3D model, which allows you to take the sawbench apart and see how it goes together. SketchUp is a free program from Google and well worth the download.

SawBench2008.zip (11.85 KB)

2008-Sawbench.pdf (121.53 KB)

Today I put a couple coats of finish on the sawbench while I was finishing a blanket chest for the summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine. When I cannot spray lacquer (I use an HVLP and solvent-based lacquer), I like to finish projects with a custom mix that is difficult to mess up.

I don’t know where I got the recipe for this finish. Several years ago finishing expert Bob Flexner mentioned in one of his columns that he makes his own oil/varnish blends and his own wiping varnishes – instead of paying extra for some finishing company to do it.

I tried this finish years ago and is has yet to let me down. I wouldn’t use this on a piece of furniture that requires a lot of moisture protection (such as a bathroom cabinet), but it’s great for most things.

Here it is: One-third satin varnish (any brand, just don’t use polyurethane varnish), one-third boiled linseed oil and one-third low-odor mineral spirits. Just pour them all into a mason jar and you are ready to go.

I rag it on and then wipe off the excess. Thin coats work best. If I want to make the surface really tactile, I apply it with a 3M gray pad. Either way, it takes only three or four coats to create a nice warm-colored finish that has a nice sheen. The linseed oil helps bring out the figure in the wood. The varnish gives the wood a little protection. And the mineral spirits makes it easy to apply with a rag.

I sand the finish between the second and third coats with lubricated sandpaper or a sanding sponge – something around #300 grit. Sure, it takes longer than lacquer. But in February, it sure is faster than waiting for a warm, sunny day in Northern Kentucky.

Speaking of warm days, next weekend I’ll be at the Lie-Nielsen Toolworks show in Oakland, Calif. If you want to stop by, I’ll be there only on Saturday (my flight leaves Sunday morning). I’ll be selling books and will give a lecture at 2 p.m. Saturday on workbench design.

As a bonus, you can meet my wife, Lucy, who will be helping me at the booth and offering counseling to any members of the “Wives Against Schwarz” who happen to attend the free (repeat free) event.

— Christopher Schwarz