So we’re getting read to host our “open house” here on the blog in about 53 minutes.
And our forum software has gone down. It’s back for now. But we’re not positive that this is going to work. In any case, give it a whirl here. We’ll be there. We might be alone.
Then I’ll send John out for some Dixie cups and string to get this working.
— Christopher Schwarz
(Below is a paragraph that ended up on the cutting room floor of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”)
When describing the furniture of necessity, I avoid negative sentence constructions such as: It’s not ornate. That sentence tells you what the furniture is not; it doesn’t tell you what it is.
To put it a different way, my best friend in high school once described my girlfriend as “not horse-faced.”
It’s a struggle to find a good word that doesn’t make the furniture sound like stuff at a craft fair (“They are simple things”) or something dreamed up by an intellectual jackass (“It is the intersection between the laconic and the cardinal”).
The best description I can muster is the Italian word puro as it was used to describe paintings and literature in the classical and Renaissance periods. The literal translation is “pure,” but when used in criticism it means something more like “plain and clear.”
I’ll buy that.
— Christopher Schwarz
Students, friends and mental health professionals have asked me how I became interested in researching old crap through books, paintings and by rebuilding vanished forms.
They expect an answer like: “Oh, I’ve always liked history” or some such. That’s not true. I hated history until college.
The real answer is this: In 1986 I read page 101 of Michael Baxandall’s “Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century Italy” (Oxford). That did it.
OK, that’s an exaggeration. It was actually pages 95-101.
Starting on page 95, Baxandall begins a discussion of the “Rule of Three,” a common way to solve simple commercial math problems. Here’s an explanation by Piero della Francesca:
The Rule of Three says that one has to multiply the thing that one wants to know about by the thing that is dissimilar to it, and one divides the product by the remaining thing…. For example: seven bracci of cloth are worth nine lire; how much will five bracci be worth?
Today we might represent this equation as 7:9 = 5:X, but that’s a fairly modern way to represent the idea. Earlier merchants would line up the parts of the equation like this: 7 9 5 (result).
So why is this a big deal? Many in the merchant culture used this equation every day. It was so familiar that they made jokes that played upon the proportional relationships of numbers.
“The merchants’ geometric proportion was a precise awareness of ratios. It was not a harmonic proportion, of any convention, but it was the means by which a convention of harmonic proportion must be handled,” Baxandall writes.
Such as Leonardo da Vinci’s “Study of the proportion of a head.” Baxandall writes:
…Leonardo is using the Rule of Three for a problem about weights in a balance, and comes up with the four terms 6 8 9 12: it is a very simple sequence that any merchant would be used to. But it is also the sequence of the Pythagorean harmonic scale – tone, diatessaron, diapente, and diapason…. Take four pieces of string, of equal consistency, 6, 8, 9, and 12 inches long, and vibrate them under equal tension. The interval between 6 and 12 is an octave; between 6 and 9 and between 8 and 12 a fifth; between 6 and 8 and between 9 and 12 a fourth; between 8 and 9 a major tone. This is the whole basis of western harmony.
And so I was hooked. Was this true? Do these relationships show up all around us?
— Christopher Schwarz
We haven’t forgotten about “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years” book – it’s just so massive that everything takes a long time to do. I think we are in our seventh year of working on this book now.
As penance, I offer up this awesome drawing from Hayward on making grooves.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. This is just a quick scan of the paper proof. Our real scans are much crisper.
For those of you who have raised children, you know that I am not exaggerating when I say that glitter is the herpes of your kids’ craft supplies.
For about a decade, I regularly found glitter on my face and stuck to odd parts of my body. And, if truth be told, I have passed glitter into our county’s solid waste stream.
So today I was starting some new demolition work at our new building and was concerned, nay – alarmed, to find some of the countertops painted purple with gold glitter. Then, as I was pulling up the fake plastic floor at the front of the storefront, I found that the antique heating registers were also glitter-studded.
I came home tonight and checked myself for glitter, pawing through my furry bits like I was looking for ticks.
So far, I’m clean.
But as I was removing the black curtains from under the bar, I encountered a bad omen. A disco ball – the ovary of the glitter world. It’s ours. Unless you come and claim it.
— Christopher Schwarz
