I cannot thank Sean and Simon Clarke of Christopher Clarke Antiques Ltd. enough for their assistance with “Campaign Furniture.” While many antiques dealers are hesitant to help woodworking writers with information or photographs, the Clarkes allowed me to visit their store and were happy to help.
If you cannot go to Stow-on-the-Wold and visit the brothers’ storefront, the next best thing is to visit the Clarke’s web site, campaignfurniture.com, which is a gold mine of images and information (click on the “stock page” numbers at the top to start your journey).
I have compiled some of my best photographs into a high-resolution pdf for you to download. There are some good photos of the joinery on a chest and a few interesting chairs and tables, too.
Look at that moron. He’s obviously holding a Moxon-style saw (see plate 4, the unlabeled saw above the whetting block) and he is using a four-fingered grip. I mean, do you need to see another scrap of evidence that “the Schwarcz” is just a self-promoting pretender?
Just a journalist? Ha, he’s barely a boy.
Look, I’m willing to ignore the boy’s poor fashion choices. It was 1975, and the open-collared shirt and ox-blood cords are not his fault. But his fly is undone! It’s foreshadowing that he obviously wants to violate each and every woodworker on the planet with his misinformation on saws, planes and workbenches.
Speaking of workbenches, Master Schwarz, what the heck is up with that thing in the photo? Clearly you are willing to preach your French three-dimensional clamping surface crap while using a bench that clearly violates every single one of the principles in your two workbench books.
Hypocrite.
And look at the tool chest the little pretender has “built.” More like the “Entropist’s Tool Chest” if you ask me. Bet that thing fell apart in about five minutes. Hard to believe anyone has actually built the “chest from his “book” – everyone knows chests are built from poplar or oak, not pine.
And one more thing: That’s a plainishing hammer on the benchtop, not a joiner’s hammer. And I assume the Scotch tape on the bench was used in substitute for real joinery.
By now, most people in the world should be viewing the Lost Art Press web site we launched this afternoon. As with every new web site, there are plusses and minuses (mostly plusses, we hope). Here are some changes you should be aware of.
1. We now take American Express and Discover Card.
2. We now offer a discounted price when you purchase both a hardbound book and the pdf of that book.
3. We have switched over entirely to pdfs for all our digital books. Sorry, ePub and mobi, you aren’t suited for books that are graphics-heavy. All pdfs will be served directly by our new store (no more two-step download processes). If you ever have problems with a pdf, ePub or mobi file you purchased in the past, just e-mail us and we’ll help.
4. No more Captcha code crap-ola to contact us. You can get to us directly here. This means more spam for John and me, but I grew up eating spam (actually Underwood deviled ham).
5. You won’t have to create an account to buy something. However, if you do want an account to make future checkouts easier, you will need to create a new one in our new store. Sorry about that.
There are lots more little changes, but those are the highlights. The biggest change is one you won’t see for a while. This new store will allow us to have your orders filled by a local fulfillment house, which will be faster. And, if all goes well, the new store will pave the way for us to offer international shipping. (Though I promise you that buying our books from our international sellers will always cost less than getting it from us.)
Huge thanks to Ben Lowery, who helped us realize our vision – both graphical and functional. If you need some spot-on web site work from a guy who is also a woodworker, we cannot recommend anyone more highly.
It’s a remarkably slow weekend here in our house, so while waiting for some servers to wake up and get busy on our new Lost Art Press web site, I pulled together another short booklet of images for you to download.
This download contains images of campaign-style chairs. They are mostly Roorkees and their variants, but I’ve included some other chair and stool images for you to study.
I am sorry that I gave you geometry homework yesterday. To make it up to you, I cobbled together a 60-page document of more than 100 campaign chests, plus construction and hardware details.
You can download the pdf document here: CF_DESIGN. It’s about 17mb, in color and the pages are in 6×9 format. That’s the same form factor as the book “Campaign Furniture” and leaves plenty of room for you to make notes in the margins on an 8-1/2” x 11” sheet of paper.
I offer these images without comment or details other than what is shown in the photos. Most chests are fairly standard in size (40” L x 40” W x 17” D), so you should be able to figure out the proportions and details on your own if you want to reproduce one of these chests.
To be honest, I made this document so you can train your eye to appreciate this somewhat non-standard form. I hope that you will design your own chest using the details you like.
If I have time, I hope to produce some more documents like this on chairs, trunks and bookcases before “Campaign Furniture” is released in early March.
