Got a woodworking question or a question about what’s cooking at Lost Art Press? It’s your lucky day –it’s time for Open Wire!
You have until 5 p.m. Eastern to pose your question in the comments section below, and we’ll respond – hopefully with a informed and useful answer…but no promises on that front. (And it’s possible your fellow readers will have answers, too – and perhaps you’ll have an answer for someone else!).
– Fitz
p.s. The remaining Open Wire dates for 2025 are October 25 and December 13.
Visit the store page of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest: Revised Edition” to get a free copy of the book’s PDF. There are two links to download it in the first paragraph – the paragraph in italics – on the sales page. No need to give us your name, your number or your firstborn. Just click one of the two links.
– Fitz
p.s. If you find any errors, send them my way: fitz@lostartpress.com. (I do have the few already sent following the earlier subscriber PDF from The American Peasant substack and will be making updates before we reprint.)
Fourteen years after the release of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” Christopher Schwarz spent almost a year revising every sentence and idea in the book. The result is a text that is even more pointed than the original. The message: Buy good tools (here’s how). Build a chest to protect them. And while you’re at it… quit corporate America.
“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest: Revised Edition,” paints a world where woodworking tools are at the center of an ethical life filled with creating furniture that will last for generations. It makes the case that you can build almost anything with a kit of fewer than 50 high-quality tools, and it shows you how to select real working tools, regardless of their vintage or brand name.
“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest: Revised Edition” will guide you in building a proper chest for your toolkit that follows the ancient rules that have been forgotten or ignored. And it makes the argument that building a chest and filling it with the right tools just might be the best thing you can do to save our craft.
About the Revised Edition
For the revised edition, Schwarz went through the list of tools he recommended in the original text and tightened it up. And after building the chest over and again with students, Schwarz (and his shopmate Megan Fitzpatrick) came up with many ways to make construction of the chest easier – without sacrificing strength or beauty. He rebuilt the chest for the revised edition using these hard-won ideas and managed to create more space for tools, with easier ways to get at them.
The physical book has also been improved. Like the original, “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest: Revised Edition” is printed entirely in the United States using domestic materials. For the revised edition, we upgraded the paper’s weight and its smoothness. The result is type and photos that are crisp, with deep blacks and a full tonal range of grays.
We also redesigned the interior pages from scratch, using a larger, more readable typeface and greatly improved line spacing. (The original edition was supposed to look like a manifesto, using free fonts plus an intentionally amateurish design scheme. It indeed looked like a manifesto – but the text was a little difficult to read for older eyes.) The revised edition uses a very readable Garamond Premier Pro 12 point type.
Despite all the physical upgrades to the book (including some nice printed endsheets), we decided to keep the book at the old retail price of $51.
Yes, I do overcut my pins when cutting half-blind dovetails. (An answer to a question I am sometimes asked.)
Just a gentle reminder – or announcement for those of you who are new here – that six Saturdays a year, we hold “Open Wire” hours from 8 a.m.-5 pm. That’s the place to post any and all woodworking questions to get them answered by us and by your fellow readers. I’m afraid we don’t have time to answer questions that come in via other channels – if we did that, it would leave no time for editing and writing, much less woodworking!
So if you send a question via email (to any of my emails…I got woodworking questions at more than one email today!), Facebook, Instagram etc., you’ll get my standard response to please ask at our next Open Wire – and check out past Open Wires for lots of answers to lots of good questions. (And odds are good that if you have a question, someone else has or has had the same question – so the Q&A helps everyone.)
The next Open Wire is on August 9, starting at 8 a.m. Eastern. (Then October 25 and December 13.)
Get two classic chairmaking books – “Welsh Stick Chairs” and “Good Work” – for one special price. Together, they’re just $ 49 – but only through August 7. The regular price for both is $87 – you save 44 percent.
If you’re wondering where stick chairs came from, these two books will tell you the whole amazing story – and get you started in building them.
Stick chairs have been around for centuries – but they’ve mostly been ignored by museums. In the 1990s, Welshman John Brown wrote and published the landmark book “Welsh Stick Chairs.” This book inspired hundreds of people all over the world to begin researching and making these vernacular chairs.
One of those people who was inspired by “Welsh Stick Chairs” was Welshman Chris Williams. He worked with John Brown for more than a decade making these chairs. Through the years, John Brown’s chairs became more wild and true to the old Welsh character, and Chris was there the whole time.
After John Brown died, Chris wrote the book “Good Work” about his mentor. This biography explores John Brown’s creative genius and his tumultuous character. And it explains how John and Chris built these chairs almost entirely by hand.
There is no better place to learn about the spirit of these chairs and how they were made than with these two books. So we are offering them at a special price until August 7.
Technical Details
“Welsh Stick Chairs”: Using first-edition examples of “Welsh Stick Chairs,” we reset the entire book in the original font to ensure the text was crisp. We rescanned and processed the photos and drawings and cleaned them up. And we spent weeks researching the paper stock of the original to capture the same earthiness and perfection of the first edition. We also made a small but invisible improvement – we sewed the signatures together to ensure the book will last for lifetimes. The book is a softcover, covered in heavy card stock like the original. The book measures 7-1/4″ x 9-5/8″. Our version includes John Brown’s original introduction to the book, plus the additional introduction he wrote for the third edition and an updated essay on John Brown by Nick Gibbs.
“Good Work”: The 208-page full-color book is also filled with historical photographs (many never published before) and beautiful linocut illustrations by Molly Brown, one of JB’s daughters. The book is printed on heavy coated paper with a matte finish to make it easy to read. The book’s pages are sewn, glued and taped – then covered in heavy boards and cotton cloth – to create a book that will last for generations. And the whole package is wrapped in a durable tear-resistant laminated dust jacket, which features linocut illustrations by Molly Brown.
Both books are produced and printed in the United States.
