Megan Fitzpatrick, the editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine, has started a personal blog that documents her work and contains copious references to cats and their fecal matter.
Called Rude Mechanicals Press, its opening salvo of entries are about her attempts to sell her current house in order to purchase a house with a suitable workshop.
Personal note: I offered to help her convert her current dining room to a hand-tool shop. She demurred.
So if you like proper English and all that good grammar stuff – plus woodworking and cats – definitely bookmark her site. I have.
It took only six years, but you can now buy the deluxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” in the Lost Art Press store.
The book is made to the highest manufacturing standards. The content of this book took a worldwide team of dedicated people more than six years to complete. It is, in a nutshell, the first English translation of the most important 18th-century book on woodworking.
If you cannot afford the deluxe edition (which ships in August), we recommend selling your plasma. Or… we will be selling a nice trade edition this fall for about $60. But the deluxe edition will be printed only once. We are printing 600 copies. And more than 450 have already been sold. And I am sure you are lousy with plasma.
If you want one, you plasma-rich carbon-based lifeform, click here to read more about it.
Despite an overheated travel and teaching schedule this summer, I have written three complete chapters to the “Campaign Furniture” book and am now fitting the final brasses on a teak campaign chest.
This book will be written by Dec. 31 with a release date in early 2014.
In addition to the progress on the campaign front, here’s what else is brewing at Lost Art Press.
1. I have finished revising “Art of Joinery,” and the page-design process will begin in short order. This second and expanded edition of “Art of Joinery” will be released this fall (I hope in time for Woodworking in America). This edition will introduce some new manufacturing changes to our 6×9 books, including patterned end sheets and deckle edges.
2. The deluxe version of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” is now in the hands of the printer. We are waiting for a press date. Designer Wesley Tanner is now turning his attention to designing the trade edition of the book. We have worked out some manufacturing details and can now say that the trade version will be $60. And it will be worth that.
3. John Hoffman is plowing through a critical part of our five-year project, cleaning up some files to get them ready for the designer. This massive, massive book is as important as anything we have done. And yes, it has something to do with Charles Hayward.
The primary reason I have been making so much progress these last two months has been that I’m not blogging much. So thanks to Jeff Burks to picking up my slack. His primary-source entries are the kind of thing you cannot get anywhere else. I know it takes a little more patience to read the longer-form entries written in Victorian-era language. But there is solid gold in every entry (not to mention the cool photos he digs up).
OK, back to the shop. I have to fit the last eight brasses on this chest.
Jennie Alexander has asked for help getting a full cite on a quotation that gets thrown out a lot in the world of hand-tool woodworking.
Here’s the quote: “Because people are dead, it does not follow that they were stupid.”
This is often attributed to David Pye and is said to be from his book “The Nature and Art of Workmanship” (Cambridge University Press, 1968). I don’t have this book (shame on me, I know).
If you own this book, could you check the above quote to make sure it’s accurate and report back the page number?
“Shaker Side Table,” my latest DVD with Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, is now in stock through the Lost Art Press store.
It is $40 plus domestic shipping. Click here to see it in the store.
The reason this DVD is so expensive is because it is more than four hours long. In it, I show every operation in building this table completely by hand, from tapering the legs to applying the finish. The DVD is, in essence, all the demonstrations I would show students during a week-long class on building this table.
Also, I am not a quiet worker. During every operation I continue to talk, explaining the method I’m using and the pros and cons of alternative methods.
As a result, the DVD is dense with information. And like a growler of imperial IPA, it is not designed to be consumed all in one sitting.
When the DVD came out, I was terrified that viewers would recoil at the length of the program. It is longer than any woodworking DVD I’ve been involved with. To my surprise, reaction has been good. Very good in fact.
My next DVD with Lie-Nielsen, which they are editing now, will be a similar approach to building a boarded chest entirely by hand. So if you like the side table DVD, you’ll probably like the boarded chest video as well.
As always, these DVDs are possible only because of the good people at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. Left to my own devices, I would never appear in a DVD (or teach a class, or talk to a woodworking club, or attend a show). I look like a lab animal and sound like a barking dog. But Thomas Lie-Nielsen is of the mind that many woodworkers like to learn using video, and he’s right.
