Lost Art Press

Author: Lost Art Press

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

On Obsolescence. This is Not a Complaint.

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This morning about 4 a.m. I sat bolt upright in bed when the bells at the Niederaltaich Abbey began making an end-of-the-world clanging. Instead of cursing, however, I laid back and felt a small measure of solidarity with the noisemakers.

One of the things I love about teaching (or assisting a teacher) is listening to the students discuss how they accumulate woodworking knowledge. During the last few years of careful listening, I can see how I – as a communicator – am becoming obsolete.

This is not a complaint. I welcome my obsolescence and am happy to stare at it in the face over a beer.

For now, the world belongs to the YouTube woodworker. Advertisers – even car companies – are pouring money into the sector. More important, my students’ conversations revolve around the personalities, projects and exploits of the YouTubers.

This is not a complaint. Maintaining a YouTube channel is damn hard work. Finding an audience has always been the key to surviving in the media profession. And I’ve never chased advertising dollars.

Video is not for me. For me, the best way to learn woodworking is through print and in person. Video bores me to tears. (Yes, I’ve done it. I hated it. I did it to please people I like – not myself.) My brain sees video as inefficient. “Skipping to the good parts” never works. So I have concluded that I have a fundamental disconnect. I would rather read a book, draw on a sheet of paper or go to the dentist than watch someone on my phone build something.

It might have something to do with the way I view sports. I love to play. I hate to watch.

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All this is to say that I can feel myself hunkering down for a long winter. Print is – for the most part – in decline. I refuse to give up on it. In fact, I have structured my life so that even if print is flushed down the toilet, processed at a waste treatment plant and then squirted out at some sausage plant in New Jersey, you can’t put me out of business.

My plan is to make woodworking books until I die. Our audience might defect to the short-shorts and man-bun dancing monkeys, but I’ve decided to let the people in 50 or 60 years decide if John and I are doing the right thing.

After you’re worm food and cannot rise to your own defense, that’s the true test.

This idea saturates me here at Niederaltaich Abbey, where I’m teaching woodworking for the next seven days. For the most part, the world has left the monks here behind. And they live a life that is entrenched in an older way.

Brown robes are not my thing (my color analyst says I’m a winter), but yeah, I feel it. Especially at 4 a.m.

— Christopher Schwarz

 

John Brown: ‘One Day I Saw a Chair…’

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Photo by J. Havard. Used with permission.

We are fast closing in on the publication date of the classic book “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown. This compact book has had a profound effect on woodworkers and designers all over the world. It is the story of a chair that no one had a good name for. And how that chair changed the life of John Brown.

It’s impossible to capture the essence of the book in one blog entry – it’s part history lesson, part autobiography and part practical manual. But the following passage is one of my favorites.

“Welsh Stick Chairs” is available for pre-publication order now in our store. It’s $29, which includes domestic shipping. Full details on our quality edition can be found here.

— Christopher Schwarz

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One day I saw a chair in the window of an antique shop in Lampeter. It was like a vision. I had never seen anything that had made so instant an impression on me. To my eyes this chair was beautiful. I had never had any interest in furniture or chairs. Like most people they were just the things you lived with. Now here was this lovely chair. I couldn’t afford to buy it, but I could make one like it. Well, that is what I did. I made one. It took a long time. Chairs of simple form like the stick chair are surprisingly tricky to make. When you’re building them you have to work from points in the air, angles of sticks, angles of legs; there are so many variables. Anyway, I was quite proud when I finished my chair. It looked alright. Of course, I wasn’t able to put a century or two of patina on it. Now, twelve-years-old, it begins to look right. Family “treatment” and a few thousand hours of bum polishing have done the trick!

At this stage I was interested enough to look for books on the subject. There are quite a few, both American and English. I still hadn’t realised that what I had seen in that Lampeter shop was something quite rare and unique – a Welsh chair. Then it was just a Windsor chair. I went to museums. I visited High Wycombe where there is a museum devoted entirely to Windsor chairs. They have a very comprehensive selection of Wycombe factory chairs and English regional chairs. I don’t think there were any Welsh chairs. The English chairs did not have the same spontaneity the same verve as their Welsh counterparts.

I enjoyed my youth. After the valleys I thought England was wonderful. The war started and we could not live in London, and through a series of events of which I have no knowledge, we ended up with a small-holding in the wilds of Kent. (There were wilds in Kent in those days!) We had no electricity, gas or sanitation, we grew much of our own food and kept chickens and a pig. We didn’t realise it then, but we were living the ‘Good Life’. We made few demands on the world’s resources, and I was happy. So, as the Lampeter chair was one step towards my rehabilitation, the building of a tin shed in a field I bought, and a change to the simple life, completed my return. I live very happily without electricity or any other services. I have a workshop, a wood­ stove and good health. There’s a saying applied to yachts, which applies equally to life, “Add lightness – and simplify.”

A neighbour asked me to build him a chair like mine. I tried to – but it came out different. It was alright, but it wasn’t the same chair. My neighbour was pleased. He has the chair now, he keeps it in the bookshop he owns. It then occurred to me that the reason for the diversity of pattern in the old Welsh chairs was that the makers did other things as well. They were not chair­-makers as such, they were wheelwrights, coffin-makers, carpenters, even farmers. When there was need for a chair, somebody in the village made it, or they made their own. They didn’t have patterns and jigs for continuous production. They had no consistent supply of uniform material. They used their eyes and their experience. It was like a sculptor doing his work, they ‘thought’ the chair, then they built their ‘think’. Some of these chairs are a disaster to sit on, most uncomfortable, but they all have a kind of primitive beauty.

— John Brown

Get Your Fill at Suckfüll

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This morning I freaked out a bit. Tomorrow I head to Dictum GmbH’s classroom at Niederaltaich Abbey, and I realized that I’ve forgotten my universal translator.

The universal translator has nothing to do with transforming my English to German (the class is taught in English with German curse words and American showtunes). Instead, the universal translator is a tape measure that has both U.S. Customary Units (inches) and metric.

This way I can translate my drawings and instruction into metric without asking (for the thousandth time): An inch is about 25mm, right?

So I stopped in a hardware store in Munich named Suckfüll. It was a small store, smaller than your neighborhood ACE or DoItBest, but it had a shockingly good selection of woodworking tools. As I was looking for tape measures, I stumbled on traditional beech try squares (where both the blade and handle are wood) in several sizes. And miter squares that were also 100 percent wood.

The last time I saw that in the U.S. was never.

A little farther down the aisle and there was a complete selection of Two Cherries bench chisels, more than I’ve ever seen in a Woodcraft. Next to that – a full selection of carving tools. I turned around – wooden jointer planes and smoothing planes. And a full line of wooden-handled screwdrivers.

Lest you think this was a woodworking specialty store, the rest of the place was filled with typical hardware store stuff. Light fixtures, extension cords and small appliances.

Sadly, the only thing they didn’t have that I really wanted was Suckfüll T-shirts.

— Christopher Schwarz

Now Shipping: Lost Art Press Bandanas

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We have just received our limited-edition bandanas in our Indiana warehouse and are ready to ship them out immediately. The bandanas are made and printed in the United States and are $24, which includes domestic shipping.

We have only 500 bandanas. Once they are gone, they are gone for good.

Bandanas are great in the shop for wiping up sweat, keeping the dust at bay or pulling your hair out of the reach of a machine. I’ve been using bandanas for decades (but perhaps that’s an Arkansas thing). So we decided to offer a Lost Art Press bandana/battle flag to our customers.

Like all Lost Art Press products, we try to do our very best. The 100-percent cotton cloth is sewn in South Carolina, one of the last textile holdouts in our country. The 22” x 22” black bandanas feature a rolled hem overlock seam on the edges to prevent the cotton from fraying in use.

The image was hand-drawn by Joshua Minnich and designed by Tom Bonamici. The image was printed with a water-based discharge ink in Oregon and then shipped to our warehouse.

It seems a lot of effort for a rag that might be used for snot or blood, but that’s how we roll.

The bandanas are shipping immediately. So if you need to stop the bandits who have poisoned the water well or craft a publishing-based thong, we have you covered.

— Christopher Schwarz

Finally, a Printing of Nicholson Worth Buying

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MCOnlineCover_360xPeter Nicholson’s “The Mechanic’s Companion” is one of the landmark English-language books on woodworking (plus carpentry, blacksmithing and other allied trades). But the current versions available to read are hard to recommend:

  1. The Google Books version is free, and it’s a great place to get a taste of Nicholson’s clear instructions and insights into traditional hand-tool woodworking. I, however, can’t stand to read books on a screen.
  2. An original 19th-century printing of the book is expensive. I paid about $300 for my copy many years back, and it’s binding is barely holding together. This, however, is my current go-to version when researching.
  3. There are “print-on-demand” (POD) versions of the book. Some of these are just printouts of the Google Books version (and entirely suck). Other POD versions feature pages that have been cleaned up. These are better, but they fall apart with just a little use. Print-on-demand technology is good for some things, but not a classic text.

Now Megan Fitzpatrick is offering a proper version of “Mechanic’s Companion” that is about the same price as a print-on-demand book but is printed on modern domestic offset printing presses and features a sewn binding and a hardcover.

This is the Nicholson book I’ve always wanted to be able to recommend. (You can place a pre-publication order here – it’s just $34, which includes domestic shipping.)

Some of the specifications for this book might seem familiar to Lost Art Press customers. That’s because we shared our technical manufacturing expertise with Megan so she could create this book at a reasonable cost to you. She is doing this with our blessing.

When we reprint books, such as the Stanley No. 34 catalogue, we use a special scanning regimen that results in a book that is all-but indistinguishable from the original. Most POD books feature jagged text and line art. This is one of our few trade secrets, and we shared it with Megan so she could make this book.

Not that we did any of the heavy lifting. Megan spent more than 100 hours scanning my original copy of Nicholson and then cleaning each page individually. She removed the “foxing” from every page and rebuilt many broken letters and words, pixel by pixel.

If you’ve always wanted a fine copy of Nicholson, this is your chance. Or if you don’t know much about Nicholson but like to support independent publishers, this is also your chance.

Highly, highly recommended.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Why didn’t Lost Art Press publish this title? Frankly, we have our hands completely full with newly written books. We welcome this (and other) high-quality reprints.