The hats we sell at Lost Art Press are likely the dumbest corporate self-promotional item ever.
We don’t have our company’s name on the hat. Nor our web site’s url. Catchy slogan? Nope. The only thing on the hat is a set of embroidered dividers taken from Joseph Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises.”
Heck we don’t even make much money selling the hats. They’re premium caps from Adams – the same brand that Thos. Moser uses.
But I love my hat. It saved me $200.
Let’s back up a couple months. During a nasty snowstorm I pulled my wife’s Honda into our driveway and put it into park as I was still sliding a bit. The car’s shift interlock went haywire. Bottom line: The transmission was jammed in “park” and wouldn’t budge.
Thanks to a little trick from the Honda people I bypassed the lock and was able to get the car into “drive” and took it to the dealer. They recommended replacing a solenoid and a few other routine maintenance things I’ve been putting off. Price: $300.
So I sat my hinder down in the lobby as they worked on the truck. An hour later the service manager fetched me.
“The bill was $300,” he tells me. Then he lowers his voice. “But seeing as how you’re in the brotherhood, the bill is $100.”
I’m bewildered, but I’m not not so stupid as to ask questions. I pay the bill. I drive home.
I told my wife the story and she figured it out: It was my Lost Art Press hat. The dividers are part of the traditional Masonic symbol. The service manager assumed I was a Mason and cut me a deal.
Thanks to everyone who has signed up for one of these books. They will arrive in Brooklyn this week for Joel Moskowitz to sign. Then he’ll dispatch them to their final destination. If you reserved a copy, you’ll be hearing from Sharon or Joel soon.
I’ve hesitated to write this blog entry because it will seem self-serving. But by now, all the people who visit this blog have made a decision. Either you’ve bought “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” or you haven’t.
So I’m not trying to change your mind about the book. I really don’t care either way if you buy it. In fact, if you want to borrow my copy to read it, drop me a line. I trust woodworkers to send it back.
Today, April 4, is one year to the day that I threw myself into this project like a virgin into a volcano. I’d read the original 1839 text about three or four times. I’d bought $300 worth of white pine and another $300 of black cherry harvested from an Indiana cemetery. (Yes, I do worry that the wood is cursed.)
As I stood before the pile of wood in the shop I wondered if I was doing the right thing. It would be so much easier just to republish the original 1839 text with some quick historical notes. That finished book could be at the printer in a matter of a couple weeks. Instead, I thought it would be a good idea to test the original text by rebuilding the three projects by hand, just as Thomas – the hero of the book – did.
There was no guarantee that I’d learn anything from the process. In fact, there really wasn’t anything presented in the 1839 text that I didn’t already know how to do quite well by hand – mortising, tenoning, dovetails, stock prep, carcase construction. I’ve been comfortable with all those hand operations for some time.
So I was looking for something else when I started slicing into the pine to make the Packing Box, the first project in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.” But I didn’t quite know what.
Let me spoil the ending: I did learn something that I now carry with me every day. But I didn’t realize it until the book was published and mailed out to readers. My little moment of insight came months later when I was building a reproduction of a small side table for the White Water Shaker Village.
Unlike when building projects for “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” there were no “rules” about how this Shaker table got built. I could crank up the CNC machine (if I had one) and barf out the table. But I didn’t take the machine route. Sure, I used a couple machines to get the legs into shape. Those were a nightmare.
But almost everything else was by hand. Why? Because I knew this table had something to teach me, even though I had no idea what that something was.
I know this is starting to sound like an Escher drawing so let me short-circuit the spiral. Hand skills develop differently than machine skills. I can say this because I have both. Hand skills develop in strange ways that aren’t linear.
When you learn to saw – really flipping saw – you learn something else other than tracking a line. You learn what perpendicular is. Not theoretical perpendicular. Real gut-check perpendicular. You can look at anything, and and your perpendicular senses start tingling when things are just right.
And that makes you awesome with a chisel, moulding planes and the brace. Learn to saw, and the quality of your mortises take off.
Oh and so does your ability to prepare stock by hand. Once you know perpendicular, you quickly learn flat and you learn to sense right angles. So stock prep becomes easier. You don’t need to try your stock with winding sticks as much, you can feel, hear and quickly see when your stock is twisted, cupped or bowed.
So “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” made me a junky for this stuff. Somewhere out there are a set of tasks that will unlock my ability to saw curves the way I want to saw curves. So when it came time to build my next workbench, I decided to give up the machines as much as possible. Not because of something about personal hand-tool purity. Far from it.
I just want to be better than you. And this is the fastest way to get there.
Tonight I’m signing and lettering all the black leather “Joiner and Cabinet Maker” books that were bound by hand by the Ohio Book company in Cincinnati.
I am pleased with the quality. The silver lettering is crisp. The leather is applied neatly to the boards and the end papers are quite a sight.
We still have a few of these books available. But because there are so few, we’re not even going to put them in the store. As of this evening, the letters “U,” “V,” “W” and “Y” are available. Everything else is spoken for.
If you are interested in one of the last four, the cost is $165 plus $8.50 for priority mail shipping in the United States (foreign orders can get a quote from Sharon using the link below). Please contact Sharon at sharon@lostartpress.com. Or you can call her at (317) 603-3605.
These books will ship out to Joel Moskowitz at Tools for Working Wood this week. Once he signs them, they’ll be dispatched to their final destinations.
We have used up about half of the unbound editions so far. I’m not sure exactly how many of them are left because some were damaged during transport. If we do another run of these leather-bound books it will be an edition that will be released during the Woodworking in America Conference Oct. 1-3.
— Christopher Schwarz
April 2 update: There is one book left. Letter “Y.”
We chose the dividers from Moxon, our first publication, as our corporate symbol. I say corporate as a joke because if you know us you know we are hardly corporate. Our lofty goals for Lost Art Press are to publish information that other companies won’t and to make enough money to support our tool and alcohol purchases which by the way, are substantial.
Anyway, I wanted to refer you to a podcast that I have found called The Logan Cabinet Shoppe. The purveyor of this blog is Bob Rozaieski. He is a Sith from the dark side of woodworking i.e. hand tool only guy. On his site he has put a video chronicle of the building a porringer top tea table. If you go to Quick tip #4, you get to see how he designed the tea table using proportions based on column orders. The entire design starts with the height of the table which was restricted to fit a particular space in his house. From this known limitation he then designs the remainder of the piece using only dividers, to include determining the curves of the cabriole legs. The video is done in a clear color coded manner and is easy to understand.
I wanted to thank Bob for taking the time to put this information out there for us and let others know about this great video podcast. In case you want to know what a hand tool only Sith looks like, here is a picture of Bob from his site.
The hats we sell at Lost Art Press are likely the dumbest corporate self-promotional item ever.
