Our new storefront is fully up and running these days – and one of the benefits of visiting us in Covington is the opportunity to shop our Seconds Shelf (which is the Boarded Bookcase from “The Anarchist‘s Design Book“).
On it go all of the books and tools that aren’t quite perfect – items we can’t sell at full price. Maybe we spilled coffee on the pages. Maybe a cover was put on upside down at the bindery, or a few pages got folded incorrectly at assembly. Or the post service damaged the book in shipping. Or we dinged a hammer head while seating the wedge. This is all good stuff – readable and usable…just a wee bit blemished.
As a result of this less-than-perfection, these books, tools and accouterments are priced well below their usual retail price…and you have to visit us to get them. We can’t ship them. We’d lose money if we did…and not only because of the packing and shipping cost, but the human cost in keeping on top of online listings and the like. There is usually no more than one or two of any given title/item, and it would be prohibitively person expensive/time consuming to deal with listing them online.
So I’m afraid you’ll have to come to 407 Madison Ave., Covington, Ky., 41011 to partake. Bonus: You get to see us, and hang out for a while in our beautiful river city!
Store hours are currently Monday-Wednesday-Friday from 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
– Fitz
p.s. About those store hours: I regularly receive emails with special requests to come in early/late or on an unscheduled day. I beg you to please stop sending those. While we might change the hours in the future, for now, these are the hours. In our other hours, we are writing/editing books, building something in the shop, making tools, spending time with friends and family, communing with our cats….
The following is excerpted from Nancy R. Hiller’s “Making Things Work: Tales from A Cabinetmaker’s Life.” Hiller’s funny and occasionally delightfully crass stories tell of her years as a professional cabinetmaker who relished both the highs and the lows of the job.
“How much time do you spend in the shop, and how much in writing?” asked a friend of a friend who’d waved me over to sit with him at a holiday party. He’d noticed my bio in the list of contributors to an area magazine and knew I’d written a couple of books.
“I pretty much write in my spare time,” I said. “Mainly on weekends, if work in the shop doesn’t require my presence there. The books in effect pay nothing. The magazines at least pay something, but it’s not enough to cover my overhead and operating expenses, let alone live on.”
When I really cranked out articles for the local magazine where this acquaintance had seen my bio, I could make about $15 an hour. But this calculus relates to net income, not the gross revenue required to maintain a business – and certainly not my cabinetmaking business. It doesn’t matter whether I’m writing, sleeping, or working billable hours; a host of fixed and related expenses still have to be paid.
“Oh, please,” he said dismissively. “What kind of overhead and operating expenses do you have? You work from home and have no employees.”
I was taken aback. Why did he think he knew anything about my business? We scarcely knew each other. Did he think I was posturing as a professional while secretly just “crafting” in my garage?
“You know,” he added, rolling his eyes. “I used to do what you do.” He’d mentioned once that he had worked briefly as a carpenter during what he called his hippie youth; as part of this personal exploration he’d tried his hand at cabinetmaking before concluding that, while he loved the work itself, doing it for a living involved more tedium and less creative freedom than he could bear. Some years later he got a job as assistant art director at a major magazine and worked his way up to a well-paid position, from which he had recently retired. He pushed his chair back from the table and walked away without giving me a chance to respond.“
“Tosser,” I said under my breath as he sought out someone else to use as sounding board for his oversized ego. Then again, I realized, I had no idea how I would have responded had he stayed. If he really was that ignorant of the costs involved in operating a microenterprise – aboveboard, mind you, not under the table – a meaningful, non-defensive response would take some time for me to articulate, not to mention a willingness on his part to listen.
I grabbed his unused napkin and pulled a pen out of my bag. The numbers were fresh in my head; I’d spent the previous weekend going through the year’s accounts to get a jump on tax preparation.
“Overhead and operating expenses, 2014,” I wrote at the top of the napkin. That pompous jerk was not going to get away so easily. Between bites of salad Ilisted the categories I could remember, adding a few explanatory notes:
• “Business insurance (coverage of shop building and contents, liability, goods in transit, etc.) • Equipment rental (e.g., trailers for delivering large jobs) • Health insurance. (Many people whose health insurance premiums are subsidized by their employer have NO CLUE what it costs. Mine is $506 a month for so-called “wellness coverage,” i.e. I have to pay for almost everything out of pocket, and with a $6,000 deductible. My husband and I are both self-employed, so we each pay through the nose.) • Permits (e.g., for parking in our highly regulated city) • Accountant’s fees • Mileage
At this point I realized I had lapsed into completely irrational behavior. He would never read such a list, not to mention the parenthetical notes, which were likely to grow in length now that I was getting warmed up. But perhaps the sheer number of items listed would at least impress on him that I run a business with real-world operating expenses. So I continued writing.
• Packing & shipping • Website-related expenses • Office supplies & printing • Subscriptions to trade publications • Disposal of non-recyclable, non-compostable shop & jobsite waste • Phone & internet at shop • Dues to professional organizations • Shop utilities (electricity & water; the insurance industry now pretty much refuses to cover woodworking shops that are heated by means of a woodstove, and there is no way I’m going to run a business like this one without insurance) • Repair & maintenance of equipment; replacement blades, cutters, etc. • Bank charges (e.g., the cost of checks) for business account • Business travel expenses; I do sometimes teach, speak, & deliver furniture out of state. (These are not vacations, like those publishing-world boondoggles you brag about at cocktail parties.They are bona fide working trips.) • Business tangible property tax • Professional photography for the portfolio, when I can afford it • Taxes related to payroll: state unemployment tax, Medicare & Social Security matching taxes, etc. Years ago, my accountant advised me to organize my business as a Subchapter-S corporation instead of continuing as a self-employed proprietor.”
My hand was cramping, so I put down the pen and took a sip of cabernet. The cheese board at this bash was always a vision of abundance. I added a wedge of crumbly aged cheddar and some crackers to my plate – along with the wine, a perfect combination. By this time I had completely covered the napkin on both sides, but I sensed that I was far from finished. Grabbing a couple more napkins from the buffet, I got back to work.
“All of the above (and more) must be covered before I pay myself a penny. And this is not including investment in new tools, machinery, etc., which amounts to thousands of dollars. In 2014 the above expenses came to just over $20,000. I don’t know…maybe that’s chump change to you. Not to me.”
“And yes, my shop is behind my house. But I no longer live in the house. I had to move out during the recession, which absolutely gutted my business. During the worst year, my gross sales (i.e.,including materials) were $17,000. I slashed the overhead and everything else to the bone. I relied on my credit card to pay lots of bills, a debt that took the following two years to pay off. I’m incredibly lucky that my boyfriend at the time – now my husband – invited me to move in with him; at least that way I no longer had to pay for all my living expenses on one decimated income.”
“That year from hell, I obviously could not even pay myself minimum wageafter covering the overheads. You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just go out and get a couple of jobs – you know, bagging groceries, cleaning toilets at the office supply store. (BTW, there were none of those jobs available. Because recession.) Believe me, I thought about it. One friend, a nationally recognized furniture artisan, confided that he was seriously contemplating a job flipping burgers because he wasn’t getting orders. Another put his business in a holding pattern and relied on his wife to support him (he was lucky she could). But I calculated that doing spec pieces and writing would be a worthwhile investment in future business opportunities, even if I had to rely on my credit card to make that investment. Thank God my bet paid off.”
“I have been renting my house out to cover the mortgage & property taxes. You probably think this means I have Even. More. Income. But no. Renting the house increased the monthly payment because I no longer qualified for the homestead tax exemption. Also, insurance rates for a rented property are quite a bit higher than for one that’s owner-occupied. So the income from rent just barely covers the monthly payment. But at least I still have my shop, for which I am profoundly grateful.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I could, in fact, make more money if I only worked in the shop seven days a week and didn’t do the writing. But going back and forth between these kinds of work is critical to my sanity.”
“All of which is to say that yes, I do have overheads and operating expenses.”
I folded the napkins in half, put them in my pocket, and made my way through the crowded room over to the dessert table. I was balancing a slice of chocolate hazelnut torte on a cake knife when I spotted him spooning tiramisu seductively into the mouth of a woman who looked young enough to be his daughter. I stood there holding the torte on the knife while she closed her lips around the spoon and shut her eyes with an expression of orgasmic delight. Once she had recovered I walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. “Rafi,”I said, pulling the napkins out of my pocket, “I have something for you.” I unfolded them and laid them on the table in front of him.
“OK,” he said distractedly as he scooped up another spoonful for his friend, who seemed to be incapable of feeding herself even though she was old enough to drink wine. “Thanks.”
I happened to pass their table on my way out a half-hour later. The napkins were just where I’d placed them, but crumpled now, the ink smudged into a dark blue blur. Seeing me roll my eyes, a man at the next table said, “I don’t know what was written on those napkins, but it sure must have been funny. The guy sitting there was reading it to his daughter – or was she his girlfriend? – and at one point she laughed so hard she spat out a mouthful of pudding. Geez, what a sticky mess.”
Comments are now closed. We’ll get to any unanswered questions…soonish!
It’s time for our bi-montly Open Wire, where you can pose your woodworking questions in the comments section below and we’ll do our best to answer them. Comments will close at around 5 p.m.
Note that there may be a lag between your asking and our answering. Chris is probably working on a chair, and I’m working on…healing. And editing the revised edition of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” (photos for which are happening above).
We just received new stock of the Bowen’s book, and it was charged a tariff.
First the good news: Tariffs aren’t yet affecting Lost Art Press books. We print entirely in the United States. But some of the raw materials, including some of the papers we use, come from Canada. We follow the issue closely, and our books might not see any price increases.
The bad news: metal prices are on the rise because of the tariffs. And the only book we import, “The Welsh Stick Chair: A Visual Record” by Tim and Betsan Bowen was just walloped by a tariff. We had to raise the price significantly.
This is a great book, and I hope we can carry it going forward. But no promises.
We just got the first batch of Crucible Curved Card Scrapers in from the machine shop. These have been out of stock for far too long. I bought the steel before all the tariffs went into effect, so the price is the same ($25). I have no idea what will happen to the price with the next batch (some steel components have doubled in price in the last month).
So buy them now while they are this price.
Finally, we have also restocked on “Doormaking and Window-Making.” There is no price change for this Michigan-printed book.
This new edition is a significant upgrade to the “trade” edition, which was in black-and-white and on uncoated paper. The new edition is printed in color, so you can fully appreciate the tone of the cotton paper from the 18th-century engravings. We upgraded the paper to a #100 coated matte paper, enlarged the page size, added printed end sheets and include a tear-resistant dust jacket.
Why do this? Well, we never thought our “trade” edition quite matched the gravity of the project. Don Williams, Michele Pietryka-Pagán and Philippe Lafargue spent years translating the writings of André Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier.” It is the world’s first masterpiece of woodworking writing, and only bits and pieces were ever translated into English. So last year we began working on this replacement for our “trade” edition.
Get your copy of our new “With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture” by 11:59 p.m. Monday April 21 to save 20 percent (and get free domestic shipping). After that, it will be $125 (still a good price for this beauty of a book).