Domestic customers can purchase the book via this link.
International customers should send an e-mail to john@lostartpress.com
Deluxe Roubo Live in the Store
Author: Lost Art Press
Publisher of woodworking books and videos specializing in hand tool techniques.
On Furniture Design and Cooking
The best thing I ever learned about furniture design came from my mom while we were driving the family Suburban somewhere in the Florida panhandle.
My mom is absolutely the best cook I have ever encountered. She can do anything with nothing. She makes it all look effortless and taste amazing. She, quite frankly, opened my eyes to the possibilities of food in the way my dad introduced me to wood.
So anyway, we’re driving back to our beach rental place one summer in the 1980s, and my mom and I are talking about food. And I describe some fruit smoothie. It’s stupid, really, but it’s a fruit smoothie with some weird combination of fruits and juices.
I say: I think that would taste good.
She says: You can visulaize that?
Me: Yeah, no problem.
Mom: That’s cooking. Right there.
That moment has stuck with me for almost 30 years now, both as a cook and a furniture designer. And after much thought, I’ve concluded there are two kinds of designers: cooks and bakers.
I have always been a cook. I am interested in combining different ingredients until I gradually achieve a perfect balance when making a sauce or casserole or carcase. I taste and taste. Modify and modify. And I’m never satisfied until the very last, when I place the food on the table.
My wife, Lucy, on the other hand, is a baker. She treats ingredients like a chemist. She measures. Measures again. And makes fantastic cookies and cakes that I cannot ever hope to make. But – and this is not a criticism – her cookies always taste the same. My shrimp and grits always tastes different, depending on what’s available and my mood.
What the heck does this have to do with woodworking? Everything.
When I design furniture, I am willing to alter the details at any stage. I refuse to use a cutting list. I simply feel my way through the project, step by step. I can do this because I have a vast library of furniture books and images in my head and in my house that I use to guide me. I start with a basic recipe that is based on the material I have, the photos of similar objects I’ve culled from my library and the desires of the person I’m building the piece for.
When I build this way, I am always happy with the result.
During my years at Popular Woodworking Magazine, I tried to build things according to more of a baking paradigm. I took the print, developed a cutting list and stuck to it. At times this process worked. The baking soda was right to the granule. Other times, I felt like I was simply reproducing someone else’s mistakes.
So, bottom line, I want my mistakes to be my own.
The problem with my approach is that it’s hard (no, impossible) to teach to others. I much prefer the approach of George Walker and Jim Tolpin in “By Hand & Eye,” who teach woodworkers to develop their designer’s eye through exercise and exploration.
My approach is more like Anthony Bourdain. Eat everything. Make yourself sick again and again until you you can find the balance between beauty and botulism. Yeah, sometimes you’ll throw up on the street, but sometimes you’ll find something that can silence a room.
— Christopher Schwarz
Dreams or Swords
I (Heart) Inlaid Brass Hardware
After 18-plus months of building campaign furniture for this upcoming book, I’ve experimented with several different techniques for insetting the ubiquitous brass hardware that adorns every piece.
I’ve used electric routers and templates, routers freehand, drills, firmer gouges, chisels and carving tools. Sometimes I combined several of these tools.
All of the methods work just fine, and so I don’t have any particular recommendation as to the tool set you use. I’m going to show all the different ways in the book.
What was surprising to me is that the 100-percent hand-tool methods (chisel, gouge, router plane and mallet) weren’t slow at all. Yesterday I inlaid 25 pieces of brass into a trunk that I’ll be finishing tomorrow, and I did the whole job in four hours.
That’s on par with the time it takes me to do it with a router and a template.
In other “Campaign Furniture” book news: I can’t draw for possum poo. Yet, I want all the drawings in this book to be hand-drawn by my hand. The solution: Photoshop, a light table and tracing paper. All week I’ve been experimenting with taking my SketchUp drawings, combining them with bits from photos and then tracing the results.
I am not where I want to be. But it looks better (to me) than a CAD drawing in a book that discusses pre-Industrial furniture and has a “manual” feel to its design.
— Christopher Schwarz
Is ‘Ginormous’ a French Word?
Being a tad old fashioned in many respects, I need a physical piece of paper to read and write on when editing, revising and annotating “To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo On Furniture Making,” or as we call it here, R2 (as opposed to a local luminary, RG3). I am nearing the three-quarter mark of working my way through the raw transliterations for the first time as a serious venture, as opposed to the merely voyeuristic jaunts as they would arrive from translator Michele Pagan.
Today I printed out the final chapter of R2, titled whimsically (?) by Roubo as “Of Whole Cabinetry or Assembly in General,” which is another way of saying, “All the stuff about furniture making that I could not figure out where else to put.” To suggest that this single chapter is eclectic and substantial is to damn it with faint praise.
I generally format these working manuscripts to approximate the finished size of the printed book; not exactly, but it does give me a sense of the immensity of the tome. I will probably avoid contact with John Hoffman when the day arrives for him to start mailing a mountain of books twice as hefty as the 4-1/2 pound R1.
Among my 258 pages (!) of working manuscript for this chapter alone are included the odd mix of discussions on tools necessary for accurate assembly, making and using spring-pole lathes, screw-thread cutting, fluting of columns, drilling, making and using a ripple molding cutter, locksmithing, filing, hinge-making, tilt-top tables, building a printing press, the renowned folding book stand, and the design and construction (but not use) of a fancy French “necessary.” And those are just the topics I can recall off the top of my head.
After the intense run-up to the release of TMAPAP:ROM I had little opportunity to revel in the grandeur of the project. By the time I arrived in Cincinnati for the premier, to paraphrase BB King, the thrill was gone. Chris’ comments of wanting to light it on fire did not miss the mark by much.
Now that R1 is no longer resting on my neck, and believe me it was heavy, I am finding a bit more spring in my literary step.
Yes folks, the thrill is back!
— Don Williams