Category: Campaign Furniture

The last few days have been all-Roorkee chair during all hours. I’m building a pair of them that reflect the two ends of the chair’s design spectrum – one chair from 1900 and one from Kaare Klint in the mid-20th century.

And, of course, I’ve been drawing leg profiles like crazy for the chapter on Roorkee chairs. As it turns out, these legs are difficult to trace from photographs. No matter what I do, the turnings look odd. A snarky reader might blame the turner. But I blame perspective. I wish we had never invented it, and we all still lived in a parallel projection world.

So I’ve taken to simply drawing these legs instead of tracing a Photoshopped image.

Now all my leg profiles look like penguins to me.

At least they don’t look like my first tracings – lumpy penguins that had spent too much time in the reactor core.

Tomorrow I’m cutting leather.

No, that is not a euphemism.

— Christopher Schwarz

Victorian taste varied widely according to social class and the not-always-closely-related matter of economic status. To begin with, many members of the nobility and land-owning gentry, who lived in homes their families had occupied for centuries, found themselves surrounded by Elizabethan, Jacobean and 18th-century furnishings, and unless they were self-consciously interested in contemporary taste, they were often unlikely to replace perfectly good furniture or silver, however old and out-of-fashion, with any examples of new taste. A conservative, prosperous, but not particularly wealthy member of the squierarchy, like Ralph Carbury of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, had no fashionable furnishings. Similarly, members of the working classes, farm workers, and unemployed poor, who together made up far more than half of the Victorian population, did not have the resources to furnish their homes with properly Victorian things.

— George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

One of the books I’ve read in my research for “Campaign Furniture” is “Hints to Cadets, with a Few Observations on Military Service” by Lt. T. Postans (Wm. H. Allen Co., 1842). I thought the book might discuss the things that cadets should purchase, such as barracks furniture, for a tour in India.

I was wrong. He spends about a paragraph on that.

Most of the book is how to prepare you psychologically for the journey. How to be tolerant of other cultures and religions. How not to make an ass of yourself in India.

But one of the tools Postans thinks cadets should bring is a drawing pad and instruments, to record the landscape and the cadet’s surroundings in the quiet hours.

You can find it on GoogleBooks, though you might find it a cure for insomnia. I, however, found it a surprising book.

— Christopher Schwarz

I don’t like these as much. They hang on the wall. I do like the miters, however.

— Christopher Schwarz

As I finished the text for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” in 2011, I had a bad thought.

Shouldn’t I build multiple kinds of tool chests for the book? A traveling one? A Dutch example? A Japanese one? Some 20th-century suitcase types (which I am not fond of)?

In the end, I decided that no one was going to build the tool chest anyway. The chest was, after all, just a literary conceit. It was the mental place where you put your limited set of tools.

As the last two years and hundreds of tools chests have shown, I was wrong about one part of my rationalization. But what about the rest?

As I close in on the last bits of writing for “Campaign Furniture,” I am entering the “second guessing” phase of the project. Today I drew up some folding shelves that work using the same mechanism as the folding table I’ve built. As my pencil sketched in the hinges, I thought: I should build this. It’s just too cool.

These shelves fold flat after you pull out the center shelf, which is fit firmly into a groove/dado/rabbets in each side of the case. It is a crazy-cool use of 12 butt hinges.

So I’m trying to figure out if I have the time to build the shelves and still make my Dec. 31 deadline. I won’t extend the deadline. I can’t. But can I fit in this last piece?

— Christopher Schwarz