All my books sold through Lost Art Press will be signed by me.
All my books that you buy through Lost Art Press will be signed by me through 2024.
It takes a few hours of my time each week, but we are thrilled we can offer this small personal touch now that we have our fulfillment center up and running in Covington, Kentucky.
We also will offer the PG-13 “Sharpen This” sticker when you buy “Sharpen This.” (Our bestselling product of 2023.
This personal-touch stuff is what we have always wanted to offer our customers, but we were hobbled by our efficient but inflexible fulfillment center in Indianapolis.
More personal stuff on the way (no, you won’t be able to buy my underwear).
— Christopher Schwarz
All copies of “Sharpen This” come signed by the author and with this free sticker.
I have been stuck in a little too deep on peasant furniture and have forgotten to announce this: I am presenting at Colonial Williamsburg’s 26th annual “Working Wood in the 18th Century” conference Jan. 25-28.
This year’s theme is “By the Book,” and it will focus on the relationship between the printed word and woodworking. I was asked to give a presentation on the history of woodworking books (one of my favorite topics), and I’ll also do a demonstration on using M. Hulot’s workbench for chairmaking operations.
Hulot’s bench is so ubiquitous among chairmakers that even Chester Cornett in Eastern Kentucky worked on one. And it is still used today.
Also Lost Art Press-related, Whitney B. Miller, author of “Henry Boyd’s Freedom Bed” will present a talk on Henry Boyd and the development of his life story into a children’s book.
Of course, the conference schedule is packed with demonstrations by top-notch woodworkers and carpenters, and I am excited to be able to sit in on many of the presentations. Check out the list here. I’m particularly excited to see Harold Caldwell, Mary Herbert and Shelby Christensen’s presentation on Joseph Moxon’s techniques in his section on carpentry.
In-person registration for the event closes tomorrow at midnight. So make a decision in the clutch and make the trip if you can. Register here.
If you register or already registered, please leave a comment below. If there are enough Lost Art Press readers going, perhaps we can organize a happy hour or a meet-up during the conference.
I hope to see you there. This is my first visit to Colonial Williamsburg (really!), so be gentle.
I’m writing this on Friday night. There’s a small chance Megan and I will not survive to see a new day. We ate dinner at Purple Poulet, and the food there is so rich and delicious that our hearts might simply stop.
But if we do live, we are happy to answer your woodworking questions here on Open Wire. Simply type your question into the comment box below. Post it. We will read it and answer as best we can.
Sometimes there is a lag between the asking of the question and the typing of the answer. But we do answer all questions. Sometimes we answer them after comments have been closed – it just depends on our schedule for the day.
Please forward this to any budding author in your life.
It’s the last week of December, so our inbox is filling up with queries – people who want to write a book and would like us to publish it. We don’t accept unsolicited queries (it’s right here on our “About Us” page where it has been for years). But that doesn’t stop the mighty digital flow of “Dear Sir or Madams….”.
On the one hand, I’m happy that woodworkers still want to write and publish books. Heck, the fact that anyone thinks books should exist is encouraging.
But here’s the deal. If you are a first-time author, a query letter is like telling all your friends about your hot Canadian girlfriend from band camp last summer. There’s a huge chance that you are simply full of deluded crap.
I wrote my first novel, “Fish Eye,” in the 1990s. I got to the end, realized it was a piece of garbage and burned it. I would be embarrassed – even as a desiccated corpse – if it ever saw ink. I wrote my second book (on workbenches) starting in 2006. I wrote it, paid people to copy edit it, laid it out in InDesign and had it press-ready before I told anyone it existed.
It was accepted by F+W Media about 15 minutes after I submitted it (and is now published by Penguin/Random House). Book editors are stressed and over-worked. If you have an article, series or book that is both 1) compelling and 2) ready to go, then you are probably going to receive good news.
Note that I am not talking about fiction writing here. That world is one Inscrutable 8-Ball, and I have no good advice for you.
In the world of non-fiction and technical writing, however, queries are worse than garbage. They are promises of garbage. Mere whiffs of garbage.
And so I implore you: Just write your damn book. I mean COMPLETELY write it: photos, captions, bibliography, forward, afterword, colophon (it’s not about colons), table of contents and author bio. You don’t need me or some other publishing imprint to validate you.
Yes, this is a test. Most authors who decide to write a book will never finish it. I know this; you know this. By writing the book, you are ahead of about 90 percent of the potential authors out there who are pitching their next book idea to someone in the next bathroom stall.
And when you are rejected by every publisher?
Publish the book yourself. There are dozens of places that will print your book “on demand,” where you can order one copy or 40 (heck, the Cincinnati Public Library will even do it). We use Lulu for some in-house skunkworks projects. The quality gets better every year (though still nothing like a casebound, Smyth-sewn book). Give away digital versions of the book for free to people on the internet. Try to build an audience for your next book. Do that, and you will have a track record that other publishers might notice.
But if you do all that, then you might not care when publishers come calling. You might have started your own publishing imprint.
One of the more difficult bends I make. This is for a Welsh chair I measured at St Fagans.
I love using Cold-Bend Hardwood for the bent parts of my stick chairs. During the last 10 years I have basically a 0 percent failure rate with the stuff (the only failure was my fault – more on that in a bit).
When I steam-bend arms, I typically lose about one-third of my bends.
People think it’s expensive. I disagree. Each chair arm costs me about $100 in material. But there is almost no time involved in making the bends. Today I opened a new pack of Cold-Bend Hardwood, sliced it to size and bent three chair arms (by myself) in less than 45 minutes.
When I steam-bend an arm, I have to find and purchase some suitable material (that takes time). Rive it out (more time). Then slice it, steam it and bend it. And then 33.33 percent of the bends fail during the bend or during drying.
If you live in a forest and have the space and time, steam-bending is ideal. When you live in the city, have no land and every minute counts, Cold-Bend Hardwood is the way to go.
Note the holdfasts that secure the form. And the extra length sticking out the front of the bend. And the calm atmosphere….
My Tips Below
Before you even order the stuff, build your bending forms because you need to bend the stuff within a few days of its arrival. The packaging will get damaged in shipment. The plastic will get a tiny hole in it. And your stuff will dry out.
Do not let it sit around. Assume the plastic is letting out moisture.
Order stuff that is overlong by about 18” to 24”. You need the extra length to provide leverage as you make the bend. If you won’t do this, you’ll need to use a bending strap with a long handle to give you leverage.
That extra length is the difference between a cakewalk and a desperate slog.
Order stuff that is the correct thickness for your bend. You cannot joint and plane this stuff. It will explode in your machinery. You can’t rip it on the table saw (crosscuts are OK). Again, it will self-destruct.
There are only two ways to dimension the stuff when it’s wet: the band saw and abrasion. After it is dry you can machine it and shape it with hand tools. But until then: band saw and sanding only.
I fasten my bending forms to the end of my bench with holdfasts. The holdfasts pass through both the form and the benchtop. Simply clamping the form to the benchtop rarely goes well. The form comes loose during the bend.
Allow some extra length at the beginning of the bend. This extra length (cut away later) will allow you to screw a batten across the arm and remove it from the form to dry.
I had one arm crack during a bend when using Cold-Bend Hardwood. The reason was simple: I had waited too long to make the bend, and the stuff had dried out. The fresher the stuff is, the easier it is to bend. I cannot emphasize this enough.
If you are wondering how the stuff is made and how it works (it’s like magic), the company’s website has all that information. If you are wondering if other companies make the stuff, the answer is yes. There’s a place in Amish country in Ohio that makes its own, but they don’t sell to the public. They make the bends for you. I also knew a couple chairmakers in Middletown, Ohio, that made the stuff in their chair factory. They have disappeared. And there are companies in Europe that make it. Google “comp wood” or “compression hardwood” for more details.
