My first tattoo will be up my right arm and will say: No more posters, dummkopf.
Wall posters, no matter how nice, are not a good product for us. With the exception of the “With Hammer in Hand” letterpress poster, which we cannot reprint, posters lose money or (at best) break even. We have two posters in the store right now. They are taking up valuable space in the warehouse and are not selling.
So before I recycle them, here is your chance to buy them at the lowest price we can go without losing even more money.
Our “Family Tree of Chairs” letterpress poster is now $12. It is available in either black or green ink. We broke even with the first printing of the poster. And then when we did a second run, we ended up with way too many because of a mistake at the printer.
This is a gorgeous, gorgeous poster and graces the wall of my office. The drawing is from artist Lee John Phillips, based on my research. Please don’t make me recycle these. They are so pretty.
The second poster is our “Edwin Skull Chair Poster, Circa 1865,” which is now $5. This poster is a reproduction of a fantastic broadside by the Edwin Skull company that shows 141 chairs in remarkable detail. It’s a beautiful example of 19th-century advertising and chairmaking technology. A portion of the proceeds goes to the Wycombe Museum, which has the original in its collection.
I already paid the museum the proceeds we promised on the entire run based on the original retail price. So we have taken care of our financial obligation.
This week I’ve been reading a newly published set of six history books. And unfortunately, I should read them as quickly as possible because these books are designed from the get-go to fall apart in short order.
As a consumer this is maddening. The set cost me $550 (or $91.66 per volume). And after inspecting the books, I feel certain the publisher is likely greedy and thinks we are ignorant. Let’s take a look.
The new set of books are on the right. Some traditional books are on the left. If you look closely, you’ll see the difference. The books on the right are “perfect bound.” What does that mean? Basically, the printer took a bunch of single sheets and applied glue to one edge. It’s how cheap paperbacks and other impermanent publications, such as magazines, are made. And perfect binding – once unthinkable for expensive books – is now common.
Detail: Prefect binding. I wish they wouldn’t call it “perfect.”
The glue will get brittle. And if you stress the binding to, say, try to make the pages lie flat, then the pages will start to fall out, one by one.
On the left is how Lost Art Press and some other publishers make books. The book starts as large sheets of paper that are folded into “signatures” – basically self-contained booklets comprising eight, 16 or 32 pages. Then we stack these signatures in order and sew them together with thread (a process called Smyth sewing). Then we apply glue to the edges of the signatures plus a fiber-backed tape to add durability and flexibility to the book.
Detail: Smyth sewn signatures.
Books made this way are designed to last many decades and suffer abuse.
So I know there are some people out there who are saying: Perhaps the publisher of the perfect-bound books couldn’t afford to use an expensive binding. How can we know what the book cost to make?
Well after 32 years in this business and quoting hundreds and hundreds of jobs, I can guess.
Based on the paper weight and page count, I estimate these books cost about $7 apiece to manufacture – so $42 total for the set. If they had switched to a traditional sewn binding, my best guess is that the books would cost $10 to $14 each to make (the paper is quite thin). So $60 to $84 to manufacture the set, max (and I’m being generous).
So no matter what the publisher is paying the authors (likely 10 percent to 15 percent of gross), the publisher is basically printing money. For itself.
I know this might sound like a “holier than thou” blog entry. But – particularly when the content is worth preserving for future generations – I have no patience for cheap, fall-apart books. And I hope that perhaps this blog entry will help you spot these ornery critters in the wild.
— Christopher Schwarz
Make Your Own ‘Signatures’
Here’s a page of copy paper with numbers that represent the page numbers in the finished signature. I folded this one up then stapled it (I don’t have a needle and thread handy). Stapling a signature is called “saddle stitching.” It is a very cheap way of binding pages. Worse than perfect binding.
After folding and stapling, the signature is trimmed to remove the folds.
And here is the finished signature of eight pages.
When my mom died last year we tried to throw nothing in the garbage. We gave away everything to neighbors, friends and the local shelters. She would have wanted it that way. But no one wanted this white plastic shower caddy.
So I took it, even though I don’t like plastic.
I turned it into our Assembly Caddy™, and I’m surprised how much I like it (Megan doesn’t care for it, but oh well).
The caddy holds almost all the tools we need for typical and odd glue-ups. So whenever I or a student are ready to assemble, I grab the caddy and go to work without much thought. Here is what is in it (and why).
Glue (liquid hide, yellow and cyanoacrylate)
Glue brushes to apply glue
Toothbrushes to remove glue
Palette knife, syringe and dental floss to sneak glue into tight/odd spots
Small paper cups to hold glue during application
Galvanized bucket for water to clean excess glue
Wax paper to prevent glue squeeze-out from sticking to the bench.
Important Tip: Speed is Everything
One aspect of gluing up panels that many beginners don’t know is that you should glue up your panel immediately after dressing the edges. It doesn’t matter whether you use a handplane or an electric jointer.
How fast? I shoot for about 5 minutes. If it has been 30 minutes since I jointed the edges, I’ll rejoint them.
Wood moves after it is cut. There can be tension in the board or a wettish interior. As soon as you expose that fresh edge, it will start to react with the air in your shop.
In an edge joint, surface area is everything. Even tiny amounts of movement can reduce the strength of the joint. I have seen this problem first-hand with woodworkers who joint all their edges one day and come back the next day to assemble them. The joints are rarely perfect (or even decent).
Our prototype (left) and an anodized sample that I have been abusing.
Tool designer Josh Cook and I are making good progress on snaking GoDrilla through the CNC birth canal. (What is GoDrilla? Read this.)
We got the aluminum tool bodies and steel nuts manufactured, and now we are working out the kinks. There are always kinks. I spent Friday morning trying out five different hex shafts to see which one we should choose to ship with the GoDrilla (different materials, hardness, manufacturers).
During the testing I managed to lock one of the steel nuts on the aluminum body of the tool. Nothing would break it loose. Josh ultimately suggested a soak in WD40, which did the trick. A close examination of the tool’s parts revealed that some of the black anodizing on the aluminum body had stripped off and jammed the threads.
So we will add a manganese phosphate coating to the nuts (which will both fight corrosion and add lubrication). And we will also apply lubricant to the threads during assembly so they don’t seize.
After I added a drop of machine oil to the threads, the tool stopped locking up, even when horrifically abused (see photo above). That was reassuring.
The other surprising kink we are working out is some weird runout we get when we first put the 12” hex shaft in the body of the tool. After a short break-in period, the runout disappears and the tool runs insanely smooth. We think we know what is causing this and have a potential fix so customers don’t have to “break in” the GoDrilla.
We hope to have this tool out by the end of the summer and have it cost less than $50.
Or we will run into a brick wall. Bringing new things into the world – tools, books, aprons, furniture – is like a trip through the Fire Swamp.
One of the more important books in the Covington Mechanical Library is an inexpensive paperback from the 1990s. Long out of print, derided and forgotten.
It’s “Building Classic Antique Furniture with Pine” by Blair Howard. And the reason I keep it on our shelves is because it makes me a better editor. Whenever I’m bleary eyed from too much editing. Or rechecking dimensions. Or comparing drawings to a cutting list, I pull down this book and simply open the front cover.
And there is the biggest errata sheet ever known in the history of woodworking publishing.
The errors were not the author’s fault. Howard is a really nice guy. Well-meaning. And he has a good eye for furniture design.
Instead, the errors in the book were the result of a breakdown in the publishing process. I wasn’t involved in this book, but I watched it happen. The editors and technical illustrators who worked on this book assumed that other people were doing their jobs. And they were all wrong.
The result is an errata sheet of 92 mistakes.
During my time at F+W Publications (then F+W Media, then F+W Community), the book became known as “The Blair Howard Project” (after “The Blair Witch Project” movie), and we would invoke it in meetings to frighten other editors and supervisors. (“If you fire another editor, we’re going to have a real Blair Howard Project on our hands…..”)
Personally, the book transformed me into a holy terror with a red pen. For many years I edited under the flag of the Russian proverb “Doveryai, no proveryai” (Доверяй, но проверяй). Trust, but verify. After watching this book unfold and disintegrate, I just assume everything in a book, construction drawing or cutting list is wrong. And then I have to prove to myself it’s not.
Errors still get through our process because humans are fallible.
But Blair Howard helps keep me honest.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Maybe someday we’ll visit the Unintentional Fiction section of the Covington Mechanical Library. Here’s one book in that collection. There are others.