Lost Art Press

Author: Lost Art Press

Publisher of woodworking books and videos specializing in hand tool techniques.

June 13 Open Day is Canceled

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We have decided to cancel the June 13 open day at our storefront. We will reschedule it for a future Saturday when it seems like a good idea to get 100+ people together from all over the country and cram them into one small workshop.

We hope to restart classes this summer, but that depends on what is allowed by the state of Kentucky. If you signed up for a class, you will hear from the instructor personally about this issue. If you do have questions on classes, please email fitz@lostartpress.com.

We remain optimistic that things will return to (somewhat) normal this year, but our Ouija board is broken. And I’d never forgive myself if someone got sick because of a class or an open day. Our customers range in age from their 20s to their 80s, so we will continue to err on the side of caution.

— Christopher Schwarz

‘Honest Labour’ Has Arrived

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HL-cover-mockupOur Indiana warehouse reports that our press run of “Honest Labour” has arrived. The warehouse will pack and ship the pre-publication orders shortly. You should receive an emailed notice when your book goes into the mail.

If you are unsure about purchasing this title (it’s a bit out of the norm) I would encourage you to read some of the free excerpts we have posted during the last six weeks. You can read them here, and they might help you make up your mind.

In the introduction to “Honest Labour,” I openly wonder if this book will sell, or if it will instead be the heaviest poster we’ve printed to date. I am happy to report that this book began to turn a profit sometime last week.

If you live outside the United States, the book will be available from Lee Valley (I do not know when). In the U.K. you can place a pre-publication order here through Classic Hand Tools.

Thank you, as always, for your support.

— Christopher Schwarz

Robert Wearing, 1921-2020

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Noted woodworker, teacher and author Robert Wearing (1921-2020) died peacefully on April 27 at age 99, according to his son, Dave Wearing.

Wearing was “interested in wood to the end,” Dave wrote in an email.

Wearing was the author of many important books on woodworking, including “The Resourceful Woodworker,” “Making Woodwork Aids & Devices” and “Hand Tools for Woodworkers.” Lost Art Press had the privilege of republishing Wearing’s “The Essential Woodworker” in 2010 and compiling a collection of his best hand-tool appliances for “The Solution at Hand” (2019).

Wearing’s career as a craftsman began after his service during World War II. He was formally trained at Loughborough College (now University) in Leicestershire, England. After graduating, he went on to teach for 50 more years and write countless articles on woodwork and several well-received books.

During our relationship with the Wearing family, we have published two short biographies you might like to read. One, from 2011, was written by Wearing. The other, from 2017, was written by Kara Gebhart Uhl.

“The Essential Woodworker,” originally released in 1988, was the third book Lost Art Press published. It was also our introduction to the rough-and-tumble world of book publishing. After Wearing readily agreed to have us republish the book, it was up to us to get the original materials back from a former publisher.

They were uncooperative, despite the fact that they didn’t own the rights. After a scuffle, they admitted they had lost all the original materials, including the drawings and photos. (This, we have found, is a common problem – or perhaps a tactic – employed by corporate publishers.)

So we recreated the book from scratch with the guidance and support of Wearing and his son David. We reset all the text and restaged all the photos to produce our edition.

“The Essential Woodworker” has always been a strong seller. As I write this, its seventh press run is at our Michigan plant. The only book that has sold better for us is “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”

John and I owe a huge debt to Wearing and his son Dave. They supported and encouraged us at every turn. They took a leap of faith in 2010 when they signed on with a tiny publisher that no one had heard of. Without a doubt, we owe a lot of our early success to “The Essential Woodworker,” which is still a strong seller – a testament to its excellence as a clear and concise path to enter handwork.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. We hope to continue our relationship with the Wearing estate for as long as it is willing for us to remain the publisher. It is entirely too soon for us to enter into negotiations, but we don’t expect to run out of stock on any of his titles in the near future.

The Redundancy School of Repeating Myself

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I wish I were a better sawyer. Sometimes I wish I could pull off a nice French polish. But mostly, I wish I could stick to the script.

When I teach people how to make a chair, tool chest, workbench or anything, really, I find myself presenting it as a series of ritualistic steps. I do this, I suppose, because it’s how I approach many small tasks in the workshop.

If I follow every step to the letter, I end up with a beautiful furniture component. If I don’t, then it’s “Klaatu! Barada!… mumble mumble.” And the next thing you know the Army of the Dead shows up, and the project is hacked to pieces.

Sam Rami references aside, I am a strict ritualist when it comes to small tasks in the workshop. To me, they are not constricting. They are like singing old hymns in church. Everything you need for a transcendental experience is right there on the page. Just follow the notes.

When I glue up a chair, I have a ritual. Every part has been numbered in the same way since I built my first chair 17 years ago. Every leg points to its mortise. Every tool is laid out the same way since back when I barely had a beard.

When I assemble a dovetailed case, I have even more complex rituals for marking, clamping and checking for square.

(Side note: These rituals aren’t static. They are improved upon little by little until I get the same results every time. And I’m always open to altering them if I can find [and then test] a better way.)

These rituals didn’t come from a book. Or from a teacher. Instead, they came from grief after a failed operation. So I sat down and figured out what steps would prevent that failure from ever happening again. They are my own private religion.

And they sometimes put me in my own private hell. Today I was laminating some wide boards of Southern yellow pine face to face. I have a ritual for that, which I first created when I built my $175 Workbench in 2001.

There are many parts to this ritual (stand up, sit down, kiss yourself). But the most important parts are:

  1. Clamp. Check both sides of the joint for gaps. Walk away for 5 minutes. Retighten the clamps all to the same pressure.
  2. Let the assembly sit in the clamps for a minimum of five hours. Overnight is better.

Today as I removed the assembly from the clamps, I realized I had forgotten an important part of the ritual – checking both sides of the joint for gaps. I turned the component over, and it was a mess. I asked myself: Can I live with this?

And that triggered another ritual: “If I ask myself a question, then I already know the answer.”

I set the crap part aside to be salvaged in some way. And I went down to the basement to get more yellow pine.

— Christopher Schwarz

Workbench Tour No. 10: Lightweight Commercial Bench

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This is the final tour in our series. I have one more workbench on site – the Loffelholz workbench – but it is upstairs and in use as part of a makeshift kitchen (we ripped out our kitchen on March 1 and then the project halted because of the pandemic). So someday I’ll post a tour of that bench after our kitchen is rebuilt.

The bench in this video is a personal experiment. I have worked on lightweight commercial benches such as this all over the world, including some schools. I always wondered if I could improve them to the point where I might say: Yeah, this is a good idea for a beginning woodworker.

I improved this bench with about $50 in additional materials (cheap plywood, lag screws, shelf brackets and carriage bolts). But it’s still not as good as a bench you build yourself. All told, this bench cost $270 once you add up the cost of the bench ($200), shipping ($20) and improvements ($50). For $270 I could build a lifetime bench that is heavy and functional. Here it is.

So why even show this video to you? Well, I know that some of you own these benches. You inherited them or bought them out of ignorance or in the throes of drunkenness. If you are in this situation, these are cheap improvements that will help. Also, any bench can benefit from more rigidity, and this video shows you two ways to do that.

Finally, and I say this in the video but it bears repeating: I am not picking on this particular manufacturer. There are loads of these benches on the market. And they are all about the same quality. This was the one I thought was the best of the featherweights.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the series. I apologize for the low-rent quality of the video and audio. But it was the fastest way to do 10 five-minute videos without hijacking our entire book-production process.

After looking at these videos over myself, you can rest assured I am not headed to YouTube anytime soon.

— Christopher Schwarz