Lost Art Press

Author: Lost Art Press

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

New in Store: ‘With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture’

Posted on by Lost Art Press

r2_cover_mockup3At long last, you can now order “With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture” from the Lost Art Press store. The price is $57 and the book will ship in March.

Customers who order the book before it ships will receive a free immediate download of a pdf of the book. This offer will end on the day this book ships. As always, the $57 price includes the cost of shipping to customers in the United States and Canada. International customers will be able to order the book from our retailers. (Sorry, but the offer of a free download is not available for international customers.)

Representing a decade of work by an international team (Donald C. Williams, Michele Pietryka-Pagán & Philippe Lafargue), this book is the first English translation of the 18th-century masterpiece: “l’art du Menuisier” by André-Jacob Roubo. This, our second volume, covers Roubo’s writing on woodworking tools, the workshop, joinery and building furniture.

In addition to the translated text and images from the original, “With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture” also includes five contemporary essays on Roubo’s writing by craftsmen Christopher Schwarz, Don Williams, Michael Mascelli, Philippe Lafargue and Jonathan Thornton.

You can download the complete table of contents here.

“Roubo on Furniture” is filled with insights into working wood and building furniture that are difficult or impossible to find in both old and modern woodworking books. Unlike many woodworking writers of the 18th century Roubo was a traditionally trained and practicing joiner. He interviewed fellow craftsmen from other trades to gain a deep and nuanced view of their practices. He learned to draw, so almost all of the illustrations in this book came from his hand.

The above facts are important because many early woodworking books are filled with information that is not quite right and drawings that were made by non-woodworkers. Not so with Roubo.

No matter what sort of woodworking you do or your skill level, we think “Roubo on Furniture” will expand greatly your knowledge of how fine furniture was (and still should be) built.

Like all Lost Art Press books, “Roubo on Furniture” is made entirely in the United States with quality binding and materials. All of the acid-free pages are sewn together and then bonded with a fiber tape so the book will not fall apart. The cover is a heavy and stiff board covered with cotton cloth. The book is 8.5” x 12” (the same size as “Roubo on Marquetry”) and is 472 pages.

— Christopher Schwarz

Roubo Workbench: By Hand & Power

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The massive French workbench we sold yesterday here on the blog is the subject of an upcoming video on building traditional slab workbenches. Woodworker Will Myers and I built the bench in only three days. And even though we both work on our feet all day, we are both whipped.

The video takes a different tactic than other presentations. Will and I show various ways to tackle each joint in the bench, from 100 percent hand tool to 100 percent power tool and the techniques between those extremes.

As Will and I have built a ton of workbenches (actually more like 132 tons), we also call out what we think are the best techniques for each joint. Some of our conclusions might surprise you, even if you’ve followed both of us for a while.

We also dive deep into strategies for working with wet slabs. This slab was cut only 12 months ago.

The workbench video will be sold streaming on our site and will be available for international customers. It also will include drawings, cutting lists and a list of supplies. I’m guessing it will be available in about seven weeks or so. No work on pricing yet I’m afraid.

We shot the video at the Popular Woodworking Magazine studio with a crew of three seasoned video and sound engineers. I have been 100-percent thrilled with F+W’s work on videos in the past, and so it was an obvious choice to hire them to shoot our video. So expect a lot of great close-up camera work and excellent sound.

In the meantime, enjoy the photos I took of the construction progress. I swear I did 50 percent of the work on the workbench; I was the guy who brought a camera to the shoot.

— Christopher Schwarz

Roubo Bench for Sale – SOLD

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Will Myers working on one of the mortises in the base.

Note: This bench sold before lunch yesterday. Thanks for everyone’s interest.

This week Will Myers, John and I are building a massive slab workbench in the Roubo style for an upcoming video (more on the video later). We’re just about done with the shoot and are offering the finished bench for sale at a very good price.

But here’s the non-negotiable catch: You have to come get it (we’re in the Cincinnati area). We cannot ship this bench.

The bench is a massive single-slab oak top – 5-1/2” thick and 9’ long – made from red oak harvested and cut in North Carolina by Lesley Caudle. The joinery is all traditional. The base is all drawbored mortise-and-tenon. The top is joined to the base with the classic through-tenon and sliding dovetail joint found on French benches. The bench is 34″ high.

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The leg vise features a Benchcrafted classic vise screw with a Crisscross mechanism. The planing stop is handmade by blacksmith Peter Ross. The holdfast is from Crucible Tool. The bench is finished with boiled linseed oil.

Right now the bench components are still a little above equilibrium moisture content for the Midwest. Some bits are 12 percent; some of the thick bits are at 16 percent. But the bench will dry quickly in the next few months if stored indoors. Like all slab workbenches, you’ll need to flatten the top once it settles down. But Will and I think this slab is really mild – it was dead flat when we started with no twist.

The price is $3,000, cash or check. It goes to the first person to say: I’ll take it and I’ll come get it. If you want it, please send an email to help@lostartpress.com. If we don’t find a buyer, we’ll just throw the bench on the large pile of benches behind my shop.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Letterpress Version of ‘Roman Workbenches’

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We are quickly closing in on getting “Roman Workbenches” to press at Steamwhistle Press, and I would like to tell you this now: This is unlike any book we have done before.

The book will be printed letterpress on an old Vandercook proofing press – the same press we used to print “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” posters. To print the book we will first make special polymer plates that will be affixed to the bed of the Vandercook. Every sheet of paper will be fed by hand into the press and pulled for drying by hand.

Normally we print our books at Lost Art Press using a modern and highly automated offset process, which is (relatively) inexpensive and produces a nice result.

But letterpress printing is something else. It’s physical instead of chemical. Every character and every line makes an impression into the paper. The ink spread is regulated by hand. So a letterpress book is as much a textural experience as an intellectual one. If you have ever held a book from the 18th or 19th century and wondered why it spoke to you, my guess is you have sensed this manufacturing difference.

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This week Brian Stuparyk at Steamwhistle and I pored over paper samples to find the right combination of brightness, weight and texture. Right now it looks like we are going to use paper from Mohawk, which made the paper for the deluxe edition of “Roubo on Marquetry.”

Also, Nicholas Moegly is now working on the 14 hand-drawn illustrations for the book (a draft of Figure 1 is at the top of this entry).

Once we deliver our finished layouts to Brian at Steamwhistle, he estimates it will take him an entire month of running the press to print the 500 books we’ve ordered.

After going over all the details of this book – handmade benches, handmade illustrations and a manual letterpress, I wondered: What the &^%* am I doing here?

But this weekend we had the Lost Art Press storefront open and we were busy from the time I unlocked the doors until I kicked the last two customers out at 5:15 p.m. Many of them were fascinated by the two Roman workbenches in my shop. How do they work? How did you find out about them? How did you make them? Can you use them to build furniture?

This short book – 64 pages and only 3/8” thick – will answer all those questions. And it will be a (for lack of a better word) sensual experience.

The downside? There will only be 500. That’s the absolute limit for the equipment, people involved, space and energy. We’ll sell it only through Lost Art Press (there really aren’t enough to ship them to retailers). But we’ll make special arrangements so international customers can buy them from us.

We’ll have a price for the book and more details later this week. Until then, I hope you dream of Perdix (shown above) and the tools he invented.

— Christopher Schwarz

Update: ‘Roubo on Furniture’

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lap-roubo-pressmark-1That deep exhaling noise you just heard is probably coming from Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio and Maryland. Today we finished initial production of the long-awaited “With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture.”

Weighing in at 470 pages, this book represents too many hours of work by too many people on too many continents. As I paged through the final product today before sending it to our printers for a quote, I could feel only relief. Not joy. Not satisfaction. (Those feelings might come later.)

Instead, today I have only to tell you something that we rarely say: This project was difficult at every stage. It ground all of us down to a nub. I am glad that I’ll never have to repeat it. And I am fearful to tally up all the money that we spent on it.

Was it worth it? I hope so. Like all of our difficult and protracted publishing projects, I know “Roubo on Furniture” was the right thing to do for the craft and the historical record. But when I count up the hours and calculate the communal grief, I question its value.

All of us can see how much better this project could be if we only had 20 more years to explore this, that or the other thing from the original text.

But some of us won’t be around in 20 years. So here is what we have. It’s not perfect. But it is done with all the precision possible.

In the next week or so, we will offer “With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture” for sale in our store (and through our network of retailers worldwide). And then we will start work on the deluxe edition of the book (details to follow on that). But as of today I don’t have any more information for you on this book. No prices. No delivery date.

But those details are coming. Soon.

— Christopher Schwarz