Though I’ll be in Germany this Saturday, the storefront (at 837 Willard St., Covington, KY.) will be open as scheduled from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on June 10.
Megan Fitzpatrick has volunteered to sell books and answer woodworking questions in my absence. She’ll be selling the entire line of Lost Art Press books, T-shirts, posters and a handful of blemished books for cash at 50 percent off retail (we even have a couple blemished copies of “Roman Workbenches”).
Looking ahead, however, I don’t think we’ll be able to open the storefront on July 8. Megan and I will both be at the Lie-Nielsen Open House in Maine. If I can con someone else to open the store that day, I’ll let you know.
In August we’re planning a special open day (Aug. 12) that will feature a fun evening event with Nancy R. Hiller, author of the great “Making Things Work.” Nancy will perform a reading from the book and sign your copy. Plus she has planned some fun games (she’s making a woodworking piñata). More details to come – but mark your calendars.
— Christopher Schwarz
Hey look, the city just paved Willard Street. It’s remarkable to see our street with no cars.
Last week I was driving home on Dixie Highway and spotted a small grey lump in my lane. Before I could steer around it, my truck’s tires went over it, and I immediately knew what had happened. I had run over a turtle.
A glance in the rearview confirmed it. The grey lump was flatter and redder. I adore turtles, and so I felt a bit sick to my stomach for several hours.
As penance perhaps, I’ve taken to rescuing earthworms while on my morning walk. When it rains, the worms get stranded on the sidewalk and die. So when I spot a living one I scoop it up on a leaf and return it to the soil.
I’ve got a lot of worms to save. This is the odd way that my head works: I need to save enough worms to equal the weight of a small turtle.
This sort of calculus is hardwired into my brain. You can mock it, but you might as well abuse me for being furry or having odd-shaped toes. There’s not a dang thing I can do about it.
I’ve long had the same urge when it comes to my woodworking. If I had any land, I’d plant trees to replace the ones I’ve used to build furniture. But lately I’ve come up with a different plan.
Now, before I tell you more, please understand I know how forest management works. I’ve visited the hardwood forests of Pennsylvania and watched it in action on both private and public lands. I know that harvesting mature trees is good for the ecosystem and is part of the great circle of life (cue the theme to “Lion King.” Wait, please don’t. It burns).
I try to use domestic woods whenever possible, reclaimed wood when I can, urban trees and even firewood when building stick chairs.
But like when I ran over that turtle, my brain demands more.
So I’ve decided to make a donation to a forest-related nonprofit every time I complete a project. There are many organizations out there that do research and work to create a better future for woodworkers.
To balance my psychic scales for the gateleg table I just completed (and shipped to its new owner in Colorado), I’ve made a donation to The American Chestnut Foundation, a non-profit organization that has worked since the 1980s to restore the American chestnut to the Eastern forest.
Chestnut was once a significant source of food and furniture lumber in the Appalachian forests until the blight, which was first detected in 1904. I’d love for my daughters and grandchildren to be able to work with this wood again.
After each major project, I’ll try to make a note here of which organization I’ve made a donation too. I’m not trying to say you should do the same – this is just the way my brain works.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I’ll be in Germany for the next two weeks with little access to the Internet (this is intentional; I’ve heard that Germany has had internet for several years now). Kara and the rest of the crew at Lost Art Press will pick up my slack on blogging while I’m away.
In “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” I tried to show how woodworking journalists are treated like geese being prepared for foie gras. During my 15-year tenure I was force-fed tools, jigs and meaningless innovations (see also Bench Cookies) to fill the great void that is the autumn issue.
What I didn’t get to explain in that book were the market forces behind this Golden Corral of injection-molded garbage. Why does this happen? And more importantly: Why does it work?
Some of you won’t believe me, but that’s because you are probably a beginner and therefore an indiscriminate sponge.
When people begin woodworking, most go through a phase (I did) in which they soak up every single piece of information they can find. Many will subscribe to multiple woodworking magazines, buy astonishing numbers of woodworking books, seek out catalogs and advertisements for woodworking tools, and buy anything they can afford that looks remotely useful.
This is when people are vulnerable. They need guidance. Unfortunately woodworking is a mostly solitary pursuit. And so we spend incredible, astonishing and shocking amounts of money on equipment, books and instruction. And most of it is of questionable worth.
Because of this phenomenon:
The woodworking magazine business had a glut of magazines. When we ran the numbers in the 1990s, we surmised that there should be three magazines serving woodworkers. Instead, there were more: Fine Woodworking, WOOD, American Woodworker, Woodsmith, Shopnotes, Workbench, Popular Woodworking, Woodworker’s Journal, Woodshop News, Woodcraft, Weekend Woodcrafts, Woodwork and a host of specialized magazines. What propped up these magazines? Beginners. Eventually, most woodworkers winnow their subscriptions down to one or two magazines. But the spendthrift beginner made it possible for many magazines to survive.
The woodworking book industry produced a glut of books. In the 1990s, my mailbox was stuffed with new woodworking books every week. It wasn’t unusual to see seven or eight new woodworking titles in a month. That’s coo-coo. Why did this work? New woodworkers wanted the latest information. New books are better than old books (duh!). And so publishers churned out books that had an 18-month life cycle before disappearing forever.
The woodworking tool industry thrives on new SKUs. After covering woodworking tool manufacturers for two decades, it’s obvious that they introduce new products every year to goose sales. That’s why you have a new crop of cordless drill/drivers every year. And it’s also why you have a rash of odd products that seem (on the surface) to be innovative – silicone glue brushes, painter’s pyramids, many router table jigs, marrying a chisel with a rasp, aluminum squares, putting a laser on everything, oddball and worthless sanders (the Black & Decker Mouse; Porter-Cable Profile Sanders), and battery-powered clamps and tape measures. The list is endless, and it’s not a modern phenomenon. When my grandfather was woodworking in the 1970s, he was charmed by a jig that let you cut dovetails with a corded drill. The only people who are dumb enough to fall for these products are beginners and woodworking journalists. Beginners don’t know better, and journalists need copy to fill the empty space between the covers.
Some of you might be thinking I’m exaggerating my experiences. I’m not. The good news is that the Internet did a Half-Nelson on most of these stupid business practices. When people now go through their “indiscriminate sponge” phase, they do it on YouTube and soak up as much ridiculousness as they wish.
Eventually they will be able to ignore the tool-chugging nincompoops and focus on what’s important: Building basic skills using simple and robust tools (and maybe a few well-built machines).
Honestly, it’s a good thing to be a bit jaded about the woodworking tool and publishing industries. It makes you a better consumer and encourages them to do better. So please, for the sake of the future of the craft, don’t buy the Bench Cookies.
Handworks 2017 was a blur of faces, handshakes and hugs with people I haven’t seen in ages. It also was a chance to meet a new crop of hard-core woodworkers, people in their 20s who are determined and talented – it was unlike anything I’ve seen before at a woodworking show.
In the cacophony of questions, comments and criticism came an unfamiliar young voice that startled me.
“How is it that you see your anarchism as separating you from politics,” he said, “when what you do is so political?”
It’s the kind of question you expect in a 400-level PolySci class, not a barn. So I stopped and tried to answer the question. Note that I’m terrible in these situations (which is why I’d be a slip-and-fall lawyer at best). Eventually I said enough words that the questioner (mercifully) let me go.
The guy was Dan Clausen, who writes the Pequod Workshop blog and is a literature PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska. He’s a thoughtful guy I’ve been following for a while, and he is able to cut through a lot of the BS in hand-tool woodworking. Today the “Full Stop” quarterly republished one of his essays titled “The Anarchist in the Woodshop,” which you can read in full for free here.
It’s an essay about the things that we don’t say about our work here at Lost Art Press. It might alarm some and comfort others. But the bottom line is Dan is a pretty keen observer and got it right. Check it out.
Editor’s Note: Briony Morrow-Cribbs, who illustrated “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” has just completed a run of 50 letterpress prints on the evolution of the expansive bit for a client. As part of the process, she has 50 prints to sell. Read the story about the process below. Details on ordering the print are at the end. Briony does fantastic work, and we love this print (I have one in my office).
Last winter, when I completed the illustrations for “The Anarchist’s Design Book” by Lost Art Press, I was hopeful I would be invited to do similar illustration projects. While I love creating my own art — my growing menagerie of strange and beautiful beasts and botanicals — there is something extremely satisfying in rendering clean, precision-based objects. In making these illustrations, the emphasis shifts away from “what do I want to say” to “how do I best convey the purpose and physical aspects of this object?” So it was to my delight that Eric Brown of Dayton, Ohio contacted me last February about commissioning an illustration of a portion of his collection of expansive drill bits dating from 1852 to 1874.
If you are not familiar with expansive or expansion bits, they are specialized drill bits for cutting large holes in wood, which use a combination of a center pilot bit with an adjustable, sliding blade or cutter. In addition, there is a set screw that locks the cutter into a desired position. Made before the invention of power tools, expansive bits were originally to be used with a brace, or other hand drill.
Eric’s expansive drill bit collection consists of over 300 individual pieces and he has managed to find patent numbers, dates and other information about the bits. After some discussion, Eric and I decided to start with six of the oldest patented bits and include text about their patent numbers and creators.
Initially, Eric was interested in having an edition of prints made from a photopolymer etching plate. (Photopolymer etching was the process that I used for The Anarchist’s Design Book. If you’re interested in knowing how I made these images, you can watch this movie). However, after several test strips and a lot of fussing around with laminating plates and figuring out etching times, I decided that a more straightforward approach to creating a large image combining both text and illustrations would be to create a relief plate. (In relief printing — woodblocks, linoleum blocks, photopolymer relief plates etc. — the raised surfaces are inked and the incised or lower areas stay white. On the other hand, intaglio images — engravings, etchings, collographs etc. — are inked by filling in the recessed surfaces and wiping the surface clean). This decision to create a relief plate meant that I could easily combine my hand-drawn imagery and computer-generated text, and it also meant that the image could be printed on a Vandercook letterpress which would make printing an edition a much quicker endeavor than repeatedly hand-inking and wiping a plate in order to produce each print.
PROCESS
The process began with photographing Eric’s six drill bit pieces and compiling a full-sized image in Adobe Illustrator of all the bits and their accompanying text. After that, I printed out images of the bits that had been enlarged by 130% and created a stippled ink drawing on vellum, carefully rendering shadows, blemishes and stamped type.
Photograph of L.H. Gibbs expansion bit
Ink drawing of L.H. Gibbs expansion bit
Following the rendering of each image, I scanned the drawing back into the computer at a high resolution to create a bitmap image that I then moved into Adobe Illustrator in order to create a vector-based image.
Finally, when all of the drill bits were rendered, scanned and processed, I sent the full-size, completed vector digital file to Boxcar Press. Boxcar Press is a shop in central New York that sells letterpress materials and offers letterpress printing services, and also has the awesome ability to create letterpress relief plates from polymer material. The plate comes with a double-stick adhesive on the back that allows it to adhere to a thick base-plate that raises the relief plate until it’s perfectly type-high and ready to be printed on a letterpress.
Polymer relief plate ready to be inked and printed
For the first printing of the illustration, I used a makeshift base plate from a ¾” piece of MDF topped by an ⅛” sheet of acrylic. While I was able to produce enough prints for the initial edition, the instability of those two materials meant that the printing of the plate was inconsistent. After receiving a solid ⅞” aluminum base plate from my boyfriend for my birthday, the printing of the second edition suddenly became much easier.
Abe getting ready to print using the Vandercook press at The Putney School.
This print can be a great addition to any home or shop. You can order a print via this link.
Special thanks to my boyfriend, Abe Noe-Hays, for helping me to set up and print both editions of the image. While neither of us are expert letterpress printers, Abe’s mechanical aptitude made the job not only manageable but also enjoyable. Thank you, Abe!
