
Our final (I hope) inventory sell-off ends at midnight on Saturday. We have seven titles for sale, from 38 percent off to 54 percent off. My most recent book, “The Stick Chair Book,” is one of those books and is just $29 until Saturday.
The sale has cleared out the space we need to operate at our new warehouse building in downtown Covington. And it will give us the room to begin assembling our new Exeter-pattern hammers in-house. So thanks for all your help in storing our excess books at your house.
The bad news here is that we will raise prices on some books and tools effective July 15.
Like all households and small businesses, we have been squeezed by inflation during the last few years and have resisted raising prices in the hope that paper costs would decline. It hasn’t happened.
The price increase will affect 15 titles, including “Chairmaker’s Notebook,” “The Anarchist’s Workbench” and “Country Woodcraft.” I haven’t yet done the math for Crucible Tools, but I feel sure prices will go up on our Warrington Hammer and Lump Hammer.
Our original handle supplier in Arkansas decided to stop giving a crap about quality. So we left them and have been using two small companies that are doing a great job for us. But the handles cost five times as much.
Next week I’ll post a complete list of the upcoming price increases. I wish we didn’t have to do this, and we will be as transparent as possible during the process.
— Christopher Schwarz