When my friend Dean and I added the 1,000-square-foot addition onto my existing house, I made all of the moulding myself from rough stock using a combination of electric routers and moulding planes.
Every baseboard, casing, shoe mould and backbend was cut and installed by me during a six-month period where I don’t recall sleeping.
Today I went to Hyde Park Lumber Co. and plunked down $800 for all the moulding at our Willard Street storefront. I’m not happy about it, from a maker’s point of view, but the numbers don’t lie. I needed more than 300 linear feet of moulding, plus specialized corner blocks to match the original Victorian interior.
By contrast, the cost of the rough stock and the tooling I needed to do it myself was more than $1,100.
The moulding I bought today is cut, sanded, primed and delivered on Thursday morning.
People often ask us where we find the interesting plates and images of early woodworking for our books and this blog.
Though it sounds snarky, the true answer is “on our computers.”
There isn’t some grand repository of awesome images of early woodworking images that you can visit and suddenly become Jeff Burks or Suzanne Ellison, our two hardest-working researchers for Lost Art Press.
Both researchers have taught themselves to work in other languages and comb the network of research libraries across the globe that are stitched together by the Internet. Though all three of us have been doing this a long time, I’m never surprised when one of them turns up a new database of images.
If you haven’t fallen asleep yet, here’s a brief peek into how we operate to nail down one single detail.
So this year I’m building a pair of Roman-style workbenches for Woodworking in America. One of them will be from a fresco at Herculaneum, which was covered in thick ash after Pompeii erupted in 79 AD and rediscovered in the early 1700s.
The fresco doesn’t exist anymore, according to Suzanne’s conversations with Italian antiquities experts (she’s a brazen one). But there are engravings that were made for royalty and (eventually) a more general public throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Once you start looking at these engravings however, you can see that they don’t agree.
For example, in plate 34 shown above the bench has been drawn at other times without a holdfast, without holdfast holes, with four legs missing, the toolbox moved and the oil on the shelf moved. So in order to make sure it’s OK to use a holdfast on my reproduction, we have been researching this tool for about the last year.
Scholars are little help on this question. Books on Roman tools were written mostly by people who don’t know what a holdfast is. That’s not to crap on their mortar board. Many modern woodworkers don’t know what a holdfast is.
So Suzanne dug up the original royal volumes of the images shown in plate 34. Then we compared those images to frescos that survived to see how accurate they were drawn and then engraved. The answer is: The accuracy on the early royal drawings is remarkable. So it’s fair to say that the artists saw what they thought was a holdfast in the fresco.
In our research we both stumbled onto “The Antiquities of Herculaneum” by Thomas Martyn and John Lettice (1773). (Download the excerpt here.) In the section on plate 34, the authors have a footnote saying a holdfast was shown in a Gruter marble. Is Gruter a place? No. A person. Yup.
So Suzanne and I spent hours last night scanning all the pages and pulled out the four images of woodworking tools. Did we find the holdfast?
Maybe.
Below are the four images. One of them has a snake-like thing that could be a holdfast.
The net result of all this work is that I feel fairly confident in adding a Roman-style holdfast to that bench (blacksmith Peter Ross has graciously agreed to make all the hardware for these benches).
But I will have an asterisk by my holdfast at all times.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. What motivates Jeff and Suzanne to do this sort of work? I don’t know. In this particular case, Suzanne’s grandfather is from San Giuseppe Vesuviano, which is near Herculaneum and Pompeii.
We’ve just been notified by the printing plant that “The Anarchist’s Design Book” will ship from the plant on March 4 – more than 10 days later than originally expected.
As a result, if you are coming to Covington on March 11-12 for the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event and our book-release party, it’s unlikely you will receive your copy in the mail before those events.
So if you would prefer to pick up your book in Covington – either at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event or at our book-release party – here is what you need to do:
Before March 1, send an email to help@lostartpress.com with the subject line “ADB pickup.” In the email, please include your full name, the email you used to order the book and your order number (if you have it). We need this information to look up your order.
Once you send us that email, we’ll put you on a list and have a book waiting for you in Covington. Then just talk to me or John at the hand tool event or the book-release party. We’ll get you your book, plus a few stickers, and personally sign it.
Sorry for the hassle. This was out of our control.
The 12 handmade plates of the furniture pieces in “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” are – hands down – my favorite part of the entire project. Though they occupy 12 pages of the 456 pages between the book’s hardcovers, the plates took as long to produce as the words.
To give you a look at the process, I asked my cousin Jessamyn West to produce a short film on the work of copperplate artist Briony Morrow-Cribbs, who made the plates. Jessamyn brought along my aunt Liz West and James Poolner to help with the filming and photography.
The five-minute film takes you through the mechanical process of making a plate and starts after the illustration has been completed, which itself is a detailed and laborious task.
I hope you enjoy this brief look at an interesting hand process.
If you’d like to meet Briony and get a good look at her plates, stop by the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event on March 12 at Braxton Brewing Co. She’ll be there signing books in the late afternoon for a bit, and she will be at the book-release party at our storefront later that evening.
One last thing: If you want “The Anarchist’s Design Book” with a free pdf download, you have until Monday, Feb. 15, to order. After that day, the price for the bundle of the book plus the pdf will go up.
Fantastic news for those of you attending our book-release party for “The Anarchist’s Design Book” on March 12. Copperplate artist Briony Morrow-Cribbs is flying in from Vermont for the event and will be there to sign books and some original plates – we’ll have two sets there to sell.
More details on the plates soon.
We’ll also have T-shirts, free stickers, pizza and beer.
Work on the storefront has stalled this week because I’m finishing up a tool chest for a customer. But we are making progress at Willard Street. The drywall guys hung the wallboard on the new wall, restoring the front room’s original shape.
And Mike Sadoff, my right-hand worker bee these days, has begun the joyous process of priming over the purple paint.
After staring at the back room for a long while today, I think I know what to do with the brick archway to restore that area’s Second Empire/Victorian feel. More details when my head catches up with my gut.
We’ve just been notified by the printing plant that “
