Lost Art Press

New in Store: ‘The Woodworker Vol. IV, Shop & Furniture’

Posted on by Lost Art Press

hayward_cover4_img_2253I’m pleased to announce that the fourth and final volume of “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years Vol. IV, The Shop & Furniture” is now at the printer and you can place an advance order for the book here. The 336-page book is $39 and will ship in February.

This new volume covers three different topics:

1) The Workshop, including the design and construction of workbenches, tool chests and wall cabinets. There’s also an entire section devoted to “appliances,” which are workshop accessories such as shooting boards.

2) Furniture & its Details, includes a discussion of all the important Western furniture styles, including their construction, mouldings and metal hardware. This section also includes the construction drawings for many important and famous pieces of furniture examined by Charles H. Hayward during his tenure at The Woodworker magazine.

3) Odds & Sods. In addition to offering its readers practical information for the shop, The Woodworker also asked it subscribers to think about the craft and its place in modern society. We have included many of our favorite philosophical pieces in this final section.

You can download a nice excerpt here. The complete table of contents is here.

The History of the Project

The publication of this book marks the end of a journey that began even before John and I incorporated Lost Art Press. About 10 years ago, John and I began to investigate who owned the rights to material written by Charles H. Hayward during his time at The Woodworker.

After successfully obtaining the reprint rights to the material in The Woodworker, the next job was to obtain every copy of the magazine during the time Hayward was editor. All of these magazines had to be imported to the United States from the United Kingdom and Europe and were purchased from small bookshops and individuals.

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Luckily, The Woodworker used to bind a year’s worth of editions into a hardbound annual. So we had to track down about 35 annuals instead of 420 monthly issues. Even so, it was an expensive and time-consuming endeavor because some of the annuals published during World War II were difficult to come by.

Then we had to read them all.

During a long series of evenings, Megan Fitzpatrick, Phil Hirz and I pored over every page of every issue and flagged all the articles we thought were worth reprinting. The topics of the articles overlapped a lot – there were dozens of articles on French polishing and poultry sheds, for example. So even after picking the best articles we culled them further to minimize the redundancy.

To make the articles easier to scan, we cut apart the bindings of all the books. First we used a knife. Then we switched to the band saw.

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I can hear some of you howling about us destroying these books. But keep in mind that all these books are pretty much doomed because they were printed on acidic paper that is already falling apart. Yes, there are non-destructive methods to scan material (we use them all the time). But in this case, the band saw was the best way to go.

Enter Ty Black, a woodworker and computer nerd who scanned all of the pages and wrote a special program for processing the images that adjusted each image so it was crisp and clear. Though I wrote about the whole process in one paragraph, it took a year.

We reset all the text from scratch. So it had to be compared to the original paper files to make sure it was correct. It took John months of work to do this and enter all the text into InDesign files.

During the last two years, Linda Watts and Meghan B. designed the pages for the books and tried to retain the vintage feel of the magazine in the layouts. And Megan Fitzpatrick, Kara Gebhart Uhl and I gave a final edit to all the text to clean it all up.

It was as grueling as our Roubo project, but grueling in different ways. Roubo’s text makes my brain hurt after a large dose of it. With this project, it was dealing with the thousands of images and complexity of the layouts that made me wonder when happy hour would start (is 11 a.m. too early?).

We hope you like the result.

Like all Lost Art Press books, “The Woodworker: The Charles Hayward Years” is produced and printed entirely in the United States. At 336 pages, it is printed on smooth acid-free #60 paper and joined with a tough binding that is sewn, affixed with fiber tape and then glued. The pages are covered in dense hardbound covers that are wrapped with cotton cloth.

I am personally thrilled to close the book on this book and have one less gargantuan quest on my to-do list.

— Christopher Schwarz

30 thoughts on “New in Store: ‘The Woodworker Vol. IV, Shop & Furniture’”

  6. Sir,
    In a way it is like writing the OED, which I have all 20 volumes.

    Thank you all for such a fine effort and a hearty well done Ralph

  7. Like all your books, it’s an amazing value considering all the work involved in publishing it. I don’t know how you make any money. It’s wonderful that you’re able to subsist on nothing but beanie weenies on toast. I love them. The books, not the beanie weenies.

  9. Destroying a few dying copies of a book, in order to preserve the contents for the present and future? I’d say it’s more than acceptable.

  10. Congrats, and thank you! Was just reading parts of Volume 3 this week and very much looking forward to this final volume. Hats off to all involved.
    Following the law of conservation of the to-do list, here’s a question: have you ever thought about a compilation of all of the woodworking pieces from Foxfire? I read these in school growing up in SC, and then forgot about them for years until I ran across a reference to them in ‘Old Ways of Working Wood.’
    You may have seen this in your recent research on Roman benches but Bealer mentions that the Roman way of holding work for edge planing, between wedges between parallel pegs, shows up in a picture in Foxfire III.
    So a long way of asking whether some of the techniques used by Appalachian woodworkers might have some interest? I gather that Foxfire covers things ranging from design of pole lathes to seat weaving and log building. Anyways, perhaps some food for thought.

  11. The only thing to say is thank you to you and your team. You have saved another critical cultural resource that most surely would have become lost to history. I feel bad though, how do you top Roubo, Hayward and Viires. Perhaps you have a line on a reprint of a book on woodworking from a little known carpenter from Nazareth. Take Care and again thank you.

  13. 339 Pages????? That means it’s thicker than volume three. I thought you had a good thing going when volume one was the thickest, volume two slightly thinner- but then you make volume three thicker than volume four! Do you have any idea what this mismatch does to an obsessive compulsive? I am going to have to tear pages out of volume four and put them inside volume three to balance this out or else the WHOLE BOOKSHELF WILL LOOK LIKE CRAP!

  14. Sorry to be picky, but page 1176 has a typo. Under ‘The Vice’ one of the words ‘check’ should read ‘cheek’. And again on Fig. 4 page 1177. Arrgh! I keep finding more! Cutting list: ” timber be bought panned” So sorry. Shall I keep going? However, nice work and congratulations!

  16. Chris, Fantastic! Can you post the entire Table of Contents for all four volumes as one PDF? That would be great for those of us who use this as a constant resource. Thanks to and your whole team for all of the work!

  18. Cheers to the conclusion of the Charles H. Hayward project, and to the /next/ gargantuan Lost Art Press! Whatever it may be!

  19. I’m reading (in fits and starts) Vol. 3 right now and it truly is wonderful!

    I don’t really know where else to ask this, and hope for a veteran to pass some advice down to a beginner (that’s me).

    I’m working on a frame construction for a wedding gift, to hold a heavy tile. I want the tile held firmly in the frame so that it can as easily be hung on the wall or leaned up on a shelf. Specifically I’m thinking, if they recipients choose to put it on a shelf, I don’t want gravity pulling the tile back from the front of the groove or rabbet, it would make it look a tad shoddy.

    At first, I thought a grooved construction would handle this, and of course it would. But I realized the OBVIOUS downside is that the tile is pretty well fixed in place at this point, which makes the usefulness of the frame nil if they decide to add tiles to the collection and change them out periodically.

    Thus, rabbet makes perfect sense. I looked through Hayward Vol. 3 last night and read each article (and looked at the amazing diagrams) for building a M&T framework with rabbet. It makes perfect sense and I did something very similar on a previous project (though in a much less elegant way — wish I had read this book first :p).

    What I wonder is, what would folks here do for this type of project, where the object you’re fixing in the frame’s rabbet is much heavier than the glass/photo of a picture frame, and you want it fit snugly? Are there good types of hardware for this sort of thing? Do you make your own wooden “hardware” of some sort?

    One follow-up — is there a rule of thumb for how big the haunch in this construction should be? None of the articles seem to say, even the one where they illustrate the problems with oversized and undersized haunches.

  21. As soon as I have the funds I will be ordering volume four to complete my set. As the first three are wonderful pieces of work,I anticipate that this volume will be on par. One questions, are there any plans to reprint the annual volumes in intact. Even if they were just very basic reproductions, I think I would be interested in collecting them (and it’s not just to satisfy my unhealthy fascination with poultry sheds…okay yes it is).

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