We are putting the finishing touches on Nancy Hiller’s “Kitchen Think” book this week. It should go to press late this week or early next. We just have to make some copy editing changes from Kara Gebhart Uhl and tweak a drawing.
We will open up pre-publication orders soon. The book will be hardbound, 8.5” x 11”, printed on coated, matte paper and 368 pages long. Full color throughout. And thanks to our long-time relationship with our printing plant in Tennessee, we can sell this book for $38 (that’s about $6 less than I thought it would be).
The content is, of course, great. And we’ll be writing more about it soon. The book is a great mix of practical how-to, hard-won lessons on kitchen design and lots of inspiring examples from Nancy and a few other woodworkers.
Linocut Prints
If you ordered a linocut print made by Molly Brown for “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown,” I have good news. Molly has made all the prints, and they are on their way to the United States now. As soon as they land here, we’ll ship them out. Thanks for your patience. And Molly deserves a gold star. She finished these prints at the height of her pregnancy and while taking care of a newborn.
Soft Wax
Katherine’s last batch of soft wax sold out so quickly that she was inspired to make another batch. They are available in her store now.
I have finished writing the third and final book in the “anarchist” series, “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” which will be released in August 2020.
We planned to release it at Handworks as a surprise (indeed, I am exactly like a bearded Beyoncé). But because the pandemic has postponed Handworks, we’ll release the book as soon as we can get it to the printer.
What’s it about? Why badgers, of course. Specifically, badgers and ham sandwiches.
While I would love to write about badgers, “The Anarchist’s Workbench” is the culmination of 20 years of researching, writing about and building ancient workbenches. My ideas about benches have shifted during the last 20 years thanks to new research, getting to work on many different forms of benches and me becoming OK with saying to myself: You got that wrong.
The book is also the answer to the question I get asked the most: What is your favorite workbench? After 20 years of thought, I figured it out. During the last few months I built that bench. And I’ve documented its construction and all its details for the book.
The bench itself is a reflection of the way I live. It is built from sustainable and (mostly) inexpensive raw materials. It is designed to make furniture that defies planned obsolescence. And above all else, I built this workbench simply as a practical tool for making furniture. It is not an expression of my mastery of the craft or my success at amassing capital.
That’s where this bench comes from. And I suspect that most old workbenches came from the same place.
What’s left to do with the book? I’m turning over my third draft to some editors next week who (I hope) will think it’s worth publishing. I’m now drawing the illustrations for the book. And then I’ll lay out its pages.
In the meantime, I’ll be writing more about the research and hard decisions that led me here.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I am sure many of you are wondering how this book will be different from my other workbench books. All I can say is that this one is written by the 51-year-old me, who has a lot of miles on the odometer. The 28-year-old me would have been happy to have this book.
Though the world probably doesn’t need another workbench book, I can’t control the ideas that grip my mind. If the book doesn’t sell, we’ll stack it up with all the unsold posters at the warehouse.
As you can see, Bean the three-legged cat is the worst wax salesman we have hired. Instead of doing something cute to encourage you to buy wax, he just sits and looks like someone poked him in the butt.
My youngest daughter, Katherine, has made up a big batch of soft wax this week and you can purchase it in her etsy store here. Soft wax is an easily applied, high-solvent finish. It’s ideal for finishing the inside of casework. It helps the look of antiques with aged finishes. It coats Crucible tools before they are shipped out.
Don’t use it on your beard. Or your three-legged cat. (The FDA has found it ineffective for growing back a missing leg.)
There are more details on soft wax and how we make it with a waterless process here in Covington in the etsy description. Katherine cooks it up herself. Bottles it. Ships it out.
Bean does not help, as you can clearly see in the photo.
During the last 30 years, I’ve heard hundreds of “I first encountered Fine Woodworking…” stories that have an impressive ending. The person becomes a lifetime woodworker or quits their job to build furniture. Or collects every issue since the magazine began publishing in 1975.
I’ll never forget my time, because it was just so random.
In 1991 I was a general assignment reporter for The Greenville News in South Carolina and had been invited to have a drink at the house of Jim DuPlessis, one of the business reporters. He lived in a tidy Craftsman bungalow on a leafy street, and on his coffee table was a copy of Fine Woodworking.
I grabbed it and started leafing through it. I honestly didn’t realize that magazines about woodworking and building furniture existed. I had graduated college the year before, and I was feeling drawn back into working with my hands after leaving Arkansas and our farm behind. But I didn’t know how to act on that desire.
I clutched the magazine (I’m almost certain it was the August 1991 issue) like a prize from the fair as Jim and a few other reporters wandered onto the front porch of his house to enjoy the air.
That’s when Jim’s dog started streaking toward the street, directly at a passing car. As a newspaper reporter you see a lot of horrible things, and you learn not to look away.
Jim’s dog ran right at the front tire of the car, like it was trying to put its head under the front tire.
When the car and dog collided it made the worst noise. I won’t even try to describe it. The car stopped. Jim screamed and ran out to the street while the rest of us just gaped.
I don’t know how, but the dog was unhurt. Completely fine. Jim hugged the dog like a teddy bear as he walked back to the porch. Everyone at the party spent the rest of the evening doting over the clueless thing, like it was a miracle sent from heaven.
I spent the rest of the evening reading Fine Woodworking.
This week marks another strange turn of events. And again, no animals were harmed. I now have my first article in Fine Woodworking, almost 30 years after first encountering the magazine. After leaving Popular Woodworking as an editor (1996-2011) and then as a contributor (in 2018), I had resisted getting in bed with another woodworking magazine. It felt like getting married to a new spouse on the way home from the funeral of my first.
But after getting to know the current crop of editors at Fine, I decided I was being stupid and to give it a chance.
My article is deep in issue 283, the August 2020 issue. It is about, surprise, workbenches. It was a bizarre experience being on the other side of the fence as a writer, not an editor. But the entire staff I’ve dealt with – Betsy Engel, Anissa Kapsales, Barry Dima, Tom McKenna and Ben Strano (who I will remind you that FWW “stole” from us) – were a delight to work with.
With any luck, I hope you’ll see more of my writing in Fine, if they’ll have it.
We ripped out our kitchen on March 1 and have spent the last 10 weeks waiting for a safe time (with procedures sanctioned by state health officials) to resume the work. This week the cabinets arrived, and so I recruited Megan Fitzpatrick to help me make the maple countertops.
I haven’t written about this project because it is deeply personal. I do almost all the cooking in our house, and my ideas about kitchens are not in line with the mainstream. Frankly, I suspect I am a little off base, and I didn’t have the stomach for the criticism.
But there is one funny exchange I’d like to mention.
Today Megan and I built the 11’ section of countertop that has to be installed in pieces for a variety of reasons. I’d surfaced and glued up the maple and had gone into total “machine production” mode, like when I worked at a door factory.
So after cutting the components to size, I got out the sanders to dress the panels. After 5 minutes of sanding, Megan stopped her buzzing machine.
“I think a handplane would be faster,” she said.
I laughed. She was completely correct. I grabbed my jack plane and dressed both faces of the two countertops in less than 30 minutes. After I planed the first countertop, Megan began sanding the countertop to a higher grit.
I walked over to her bench with a card scraper and began dressing the surface.
We put the sanders away and spent the rest of the day blasting Jason Isbell’s new album, “Reunions,” and getting the job done faster, with crisper results.
