Lost Art Press

Author: Lost Art Press

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

Only 3 More Days of Free Shipping

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Good grief, we have too much stuff in our warehouse.

Just a quick reminder that our free shipping offer ends Friday (Nov. 24) at midnight. The free shipping offer applies to everything in our store, from a box of pencils to our massive iron holdfasts.

If you are looking for a gift, all of my books sold through Lost Art Press are signed by me (a few of them inadvertently in blood, thanks to my sharp pocket knife). You can see all the signed books here.

Honestly, when I want to give someone a gift that will change the way they work, I give them one of our curved Crucible Card Scrapers. These are so much easier to use than a rectangular scraper. 

Or I give them one of our waist aprons. I haven’t been able to wear mine out. It is the first thing I reach for when I head to the bench each day.

Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a gift guide (we’ve already got one of those). Just trying to save you a little money on shipping (and get rid of excess inventory).

— Christopher Schwarz

Anarchist’s Gift Guide 2023: Day 10

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Aluminum Medical Clipboards
While we are on the subject of clipboards (see yesterday’s post), please check out the ones made for hospitals and the military. They are typically aluminum, and they work via a giant piano hinge that is connected to the cover of the clipboard (the cover protects the pages from fluid spills and prying eyes).

Open the cover. Press it back. The hinge opens. Let go of the cover, and the hinge grabs your papers. Perfect.

These clipboards often have other expensive details. They might have Velcro tabs that hold them closed. They might have nice slots where you can slide in a label. And they have rubber-wrapped posts that allow you to hang them from a hospital bed.

You can find these sorts of clipboards all day long on eBay or from other sellers. Buy them used, and you will pay less than $10 and end up with a clipboard that could survive a nuclear winter.

This concludes the clipboard section of the gift guide.

Anarchist’s Gift Guide 2023: Day 9

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Puebco Clipboards
I own more clipboards than bench planes. They manage every project I work on, from new chair designs to glue recipes. I appreciate the way they help me manage things in a chronological manner (and I can quickly change the chronology if necessary).

I dislike the shiny pot-metal-and-hardboard clipboards from office supply stores. They are lowest common denominator products.

So I was curious to see the offerings from Puebco. They have two clipboards that are better than the junk from Staples. They both have unusual mechanisms, which might appeal to you (or not). I love them both.

The Screw Clipboard ($36) is an India-made clipboard that works like no other I’ve seen. You put your papers under the circular screw and turn the brass dial to fasten them. It’s simple. The clipboard holds as firmly as you like, and it’s nicely made.

The other, the A4 Puebco clipboard, is ingenious. It’s made from recycled aluminum and cardboard. The hinge is the interesting part. It looks like a giant binder clip. But to open it you rotate the lever on top of the hinge up. Then you press the lever down to open the hinge. It becomes second nature after only one time.

I can never have too many clipboards. These get used every day.

4 New Products in the Store

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I’ve just added four products to our store that are about to be released. We aren’t taking pre-orders, but you can sign up easily to be notified the moment these products arrive in our warehouse.

Here’s some information and links.

‘Backwoods Chairmakers’ by Andrew D. Glenn

Megan and I have been working nonstop on this book since summer, and the author has been working on the book now for years. “Backwood Chairmakers” by Andrew D. Glenn is a much-needed book that chronicles the lives and work of ladderback chairmakers in Appalachia. 

Andy spent years traveling back roads with his camera, chasing leads and talking to chairmakers all over this region, which typically gets little positive attention. Andy’s work picks up where the Foxfire series of books left off. He approached the job as much as a chairmaker as an ethnologist. And the interviews are wide-ranging and fascinating. 

But the book is not just a travelog. Andy focuses on the work of chairmaking. The methods and techniques used by these makers (motor oil as a finish, for example). And the final two chapters of the book show how to make a settin’ chair and a big rocker using many of the techniques and design cues Andy picked up along the way.

The book will be $47, which is a bargain. This is a huge book: 304 pages with hundreds of photos. All printed and bound to the highest standards possible – and in Tennessee.

We hope this book will ship by the end of the year. Sign up to be notified of its release here.

‘By Hammer & Hand’ Letterpress Poster

This gorgeous letterpress poster is sitting in our warehouse, ready to sell. All we need are the dang shipping boxes. This 13” x 19” poster is the only poster that has ever made a profit for us. During the last eight years, readers have implored us to release a new run.

After contacting the artist, we have a deal (he’ll get royalties, and we’ll handle the printing). The poster was printed via Letterpress in New York by Boxcar. It is a gorgeous and tactile thing. And I doubt we’ll do this again. Price $25.

Sign up to be notified of its release here.

The ‘Lost Art Press Workbook’

Based on accounting ledgers from the 19th century, the “Lost Art Press Workbook” is a permanent record of the things you have built, the finish you used and who now owns the piece. It also is an excellent place to record the hours you spent on a project, new designs and so forth.

You can’t buy a decent ledger shaped like this anymore, so we decided to make one. The “Workbook” is a 64-page ledger printed on lovely #60 smooth and undyed paper. The pages are sewn and casebound in thick, cloth-covered boards. (We are using the same printing and bindery plant that does all our color books.) The book measures 4-1/2″ wide x 11-1/4″ tall.

This book will be released by the end of the month. Price $27. 

Sign up to be notified of its release here.

The Anarchist’s Square Kit

This has been a difficult project. We hoped to have these kits available this week, but our CNC provider is having trouble dialing everything in without the piece slipping a bit.

But when it arrives it will be great fun. 

The kit parts are made from 1/2”-thick Baltic birch. All the joinery and decorative details are already cut. All you have to do is a little cleanup with sandpaper, then glue the parts together. 

Then you can finish up the square however you like. You can leave it unfinished or tart it up with paint, oil or a film finish. Because it’s plywood, it’s unlikely to ever go out of square.

Price $45. Sign up to be notified of its release here.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Hello international people. Before you ask whether these products ship internationally, here’s some helpful information. We don’t ship internationally. “Backwoods Chairmakers” and the Anarchist’s Square Kit will be offered to our international retailers. The other two products don’t have enough margin to sell through retailers. You can use a mail forwarding service to buy them. Details here.

Please Visit the High Wycombe Chair-making Museum

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Some of the many chairs at the museum.

The tour at the High Wycombe Chair-making Museum begins almost the moment you arrive. You ring the bell on the front door. Robert Bishop answers and welcomes you into a room filled with chairs, tools and photographs. You sit down, and bam – he begins telling you a story.

You are hooked. And for the next two hours you live out the trials, highs and lows of the chairmakers of High Wycombe.

The Chair-making Museum is unlike any museum I’ve visited. Yes, there are amazing original objects from High Wycombe’s past. There are documents laid out everywhere on the tables for you to examine. The walls are covered in tools and historical photographs. 

One of the many displays of original tools.

You could easily spend an hour just looking at the materials. But then you’d miss the delightful tale of High Wycombe as told by Robert Bishop.

Robert is an accomplished turner, and his work is sold in the galley upstairs from the museum. But he’s also a historian of the people who produced 4,700 chairs a DAY in this beautiful valley in the Chilterns (about 28 miles outside London).

What is most delightful about Robert’s presentation is that it is told from the perspective of the people who made the chairs and owned the chairmaking shops.

He begins in the beech woods surrounding High Wycombe and explains the day-to-day life of the “bodgers” who harvested the stands of lumber to make legs and stretchers for the chair shops. Robert doesn’t offer a romantic view, which we’ve heard before. Instead, it is a purely practical explanation of the work as told by the bodgers to Robert.

It’s the tale of a fascinating micro-economy. The bodgers were accomplished green woodworkers who could turn a billet into a leg in about 3 minutes on a pole lathe. They were efficient. They helped their fellow bodgers. And they lived in town.

Robert’s stories spanned the history of 19th-century High Wycombe. He tells about the life of the 11-year-olds pressed into work at the chair factories – detailing their duties and the things they learned before they turned 17 and were sent to work at the bench.

He recalls the beginning of the chair industry in High Wycombe – acting out the voices of the main characters. Then tells the tale of shops who defied the High Wycombe chairmakers (it isn’t a good end). And explains the details of how difficult it was to get chairs to London for sale.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the story. Even if you have no particular interest in chairmaking, Robert tells a great tale.

But for chairmakers, there are interesting delights in the details.

The collection of Windsor chairs is well-curated. Robert has picked out good examples – chairs that the V&A Museum in London should display (but they don’t). He has a gorgeous Forest Windsor – an early chair that (of course) I fell in love with.

Aside from the chairs, there are the tools. Robert has two working lathes acquired from local bodgers – a pole lathe and a treadle lathe. Both in perfect working order. There’s a tool chest filled with tools from a chairmaker. Plus walls of tools that Robert has himself collected from area chairmakers.

I was struck by so many things during the visit. Here are just two details to consider.

The bending form used to bend saplings into arms over seven days.
  1. Bending wood without steam. Robert showed photos of how bodgers would make bent armbows using a beech sapling and a form. Each day the sapling was bent a little more on the form and held in place with pegs. By the seventh day the armbow was fully bent. Then a batten was affixed to the armbow to hold it in place while it dried. Robert had an example there with the bark still on it.
A nice shavehorse that Robert acquired from one of the last bodgers at High Wycombe.
Note the teeth on the top and the bottom of the billet.

2. An English shavehorse with bite. Many of the tools in the museum were acquired directly from the bodgers as the trade wound down in the 20th century. Robert acquired the shavehorse of one of the last working bodgers. It is your typical English horse, but the jaw features iron teeth that hold the work. Obvious, yes, but also amazing.

I can’t say enough good things about the tour. It is worth the journey from London and the 4 pounds. After the tour, I had to catch a train back to London to meet my family for dinner, so I couldn’t pick Robert’s brain or have dinner at the Bird in Hand. 

But maybe you can.

A highly recommended day.

— Christopher Schwarz

The forest chair in the collection. So nice (replaced legs).
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