Nancy Hiller’s swift-selling “Kitchen Think” is now back in stock in our warehouse and ready for ordering. We ordered lots of copies, so we should have plenty of stock for the coming year.
If you are on the fence about buying Nancy’s book, you might want to read a new review of it in Bloom magazine that states: “Furniture designer and builder Nancy Hiller works as deftly in ink as she does in wood.”
Speaking of reviews, Highland Woodworking’s book reviewer, J. Norman Reid, has a review of “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown.” Reid was reluctant to read the book, but gave it a go anyway.
“But I picked up this book somewhat reluctantly, perhaps because it’s a beautiful book, and then something unexpected happened. I got hooked, on the book, yes, but especially on John Brown the man.”
The working model of the Chairpanzee before production work begins. The final product will have some small changes compared to the image above.
I don’t keep a diary, I just look back at Instagram to see what I was doing on any given day. This is how I know The Chairpanzee was born on 11th April, as nothing more than an idea in search of a good name. That day, in the early stages of my COVID-19 infection, I sat at my desk designing a new low back chair. I used other chairs I admire as a reference point, noting their rake and splay angles to understand the visual effect they generate. Rake and splay are all very well on a drawing, but when it comes to making a chair what we really need are a sightline and a resultant angle for the legs. This approach allows us to drill with reference to a single sliding bevel (set to the resultant) which is positioned along the sightline. It struck me that a simple device to tell us those sightline and resultant angles based on any given rake and splay would be a useful tool to own, which brings us to today.
There are published tables available to use as a reference, but for this product I went back to first principles, enlisting my older brother (an Engineering Ph.D.) to do the hard bit. Shortly after, armed with lines of data, the first prototype was born. An important concept from the beginning was to return both the sightline and resultant for a single setting of rake and splay, which led to the double-sided design. Every good product needs a memorable name and, having christened an earlier product the Bevel Monkey, it seemed only right to continue the simian DNA line. My son George eventually won the pun-off on a family walk, coming up with the perfect name: Chairpanzee.
Collaboration is a key aspect of product development; it leads to ideas being challenged and ultimately creates a better end product. A good idea is also worth nothing without a route to market, so with both of those principles in mind, Chris Schwarz and I formed an alliance to develop a product that would become part of the Crucible range. We pulled apart the flaws in the first prototype, which was too big and suffered from racking sliders that jammed. We also needed to scratch an itch that Chris had: the thought that a wheel-type gauge might fit the bill. We got to a wheel gauge eventually and I still have a fondness for its Fibonacci-like pattern of holes, but it would have been too big and too expensive to produce. You have to be willing to drown a few ideas in the river on this journey.
By prototype three we were zeroing in on the concept of a double-sided slider, which could be produced to a high quality at an affordable price. We made an important step toward a printed product, which allowed us to reproduce detailed graphics and fine data on a durable surface. Laser engraving had been a useful development tool, but ultimately too costly as a production solution. Following creation of the graphics and layout, we arrived at the end of the story with prototype number four, which looks exactly like the product you’ll be able to have in your hands very soon (pictured at the top of this blog entry).
On Wednesday morning I shipped out my last commission furniture piece for a long time. Perhaps forever.
Last year I closed the ordering form on my personal site. And since then I have worked through the backlog of orders, chipping away until Wednesday when I dropped off a crate at the depot across the river.
For the last 10 years, commission work has been a third to half my income. The other half is writing and teaching. Commissions kept us afloat as we paid Madeline’s tuition at Ohio State and Katherine’s at Spalding University.
During the last three years, Lost Art Press, the commission work and the number of new designs in my sketchbooks took root, bloomed and became overgrown. And last year I had to make a choice.
Double or triple my prices for commissions to (likely) reduce them. As I build vernacular-inspired pieces, and I have a strong proletariat streak, that didn’t feel right.
Hire people to help out on both the commissions and shoulder some of my responsibilities for the press. That would put me back into managing other people’s work on a day-to-day basis. I’d rather get a simultaneous root canal/vasectomy without even an aspirin. I want to do the work, not manage it.
Shut down commissions and build work on spec.
I chose door No. 3.
In the coming months, I’ll occasionally list a piece for sale here on the blog. Lucy and I have decided we can afford the hit to my income (thanks to a debt-free life). This will free me to write and edit more books, build furniture pieces that have been struggling in the birth canal and to stay outwardly sane.
I’ve enjoyed working with customers since I took my first commission for a Shop of the Crafters Morris chair in 1997 from a couple in Texas. Since then, I’ve built some crazy stuff that made me a better woodworker. And I’ve met some people I now call friends.
I’ll miss some aspects of commission work. And now I am about to get into the truck and head to the lumberyard to build something for… who knows?
Due to a mix-up with a wholesale order, we have a handful of copies of the first printing of “The Anarchist’s Workbench” to sell in our store. So if you missed out on the first edition, this is your chance to rectify it.
The book is $27 for the printed version or $0 for the pdf (download the free pdf here).
The second printing is in the works now. If you are a book collector, the second printing will have some physical differences (there are no significant changes to the content – just a couple typo fixes). The book will use a different interior paper and have a different diestamp on the cover. More details on the second printing will come soon.
We’ve ordered more copies from the printer, but it will be about five weeks before we are back in stock on both titles.
In the meantime, you can still buy these titles from our retailers and support some family businesses that we like.
I apologize we have had problems keeping books in stock in recent days. These shortages are not a crass marketing ploy to goose demand by limiting supply.
Lost Art Press has grown a lot in the last two years, and we are still trying to figure out how many copies to order with each press run. We need to find the (new) sweet spot. Why not order 20,000 copies of each book instead of 4,000? Among the many reasons: It ties up money we could be using on other projects and it costs money to store extra inventory in a climate-controlled environment.
