“By Hand & Eye” will ship from our printer on Tuesday, May 21. So if you would like to order the book with free domestic shipping, you should place your order before midnight Tuesday. After Tuesday, domestic shipping will be $7.
“By Hand & Eye” by George R. Walker and Jim Tolpin is $34 and can be ordered here.
We never discount our books, nor do our retailers. So this is the only special offer we will make on this title.
The book will be carried by Lee Valley Tools, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks and Tools for Working Wood. If other retailers agree to carry to title, we will announce it here.
As I mentioned earlier, we will offer 26 copies of “By Hand & Eye” bound in leather for $185 each. We will have details on those copies in June. We also will offer the book in ePub and Kindle format.
With “By Hand & Eye” at the printer, our sights are set on completing the first volume of the A.J. Roubo translation.
All I can say is thank goodness for Jeff Burks. If it weren’t for his regular stream of research, I wouldn’t have much to post here except: “Day 630, still editing Roubo and looking stuff up in the original French.”
During this admittedly drawn-out process, several readers have said something like: “Come on. Just run the text through a translation program. Look up the weird words the translation program doesn’t recognize and be done with it.”
To demonstrate what that piece of rotten sausage that idea is, here is a simple exercise in that process. Jeff Burks sent me a cool Dutch children’s book called “De historie van de kaboutermannetjes” from 1873. The kaboutermannetjes are like gremlins and get into all sorts of mischief. I extracted the text and ran it through Google’s translate program.
And here’s what comes out. Reading it out loud is hilarious, particularly after two beers.
Oh, what a golden age was that,
When m ‘in every home in country and city
Gnome Mannekes had,
That was a maid ‘journey lazy and slow?
Or deemed d ‘labor acid plague,
Pst! came at night,
If mice so soft,
And scoured and performing ablutions,
And washed and splashed,
And auctioned,
And mopped,
And wormden and saddled,
And scrubbed and scrubbed,
So that was the hour to stand by on
The maid àl ‘t homework was done.
The metslaarsknechts and carpenters
Also had hard work of the effervescent,
There, they thought it was small-menfolk
And d ‘labor over for them.
‘t handle hammer and ax,
Drill, truffle and file,
The addict and trotted,
The drilled and scraped,
It added,
The toiled,
As it withers and food
Gladweg was forgotten,
Until very ‘t chore was dismissed
And the people could go. Pub or bed
The baker and his white servant
Deen but also what their well thought only,
Because, if it’s small people saw them luiren,
Came it from the chimney for the day.
They took the flour
From attic or part,
They sifted and kneaded it,
They weighed and did it,
they moved
‘t In d’ oven,
Stoking the coals on
And fit well on
Until, at the crowing of the cock,
The boss’ t diff baking was done standing.
it went to the butcher just so far:
Had that night to a pig or cow,
But he and his servant often,
‘t Leprechaun People helped with entertainment.
Keelden that the animal,
Which made it nigh,
Who went to ‘t heels,
Getting it down and snap,
That flushing,
Which churned,
Who smeared and spilled,
Who stopped the sausages,
And, dear broke tomorrow,
‘t Meat was only to save. upon the hook
The kastlein tasted sweet in inward peace
But up to his guests;
Because it was all his work which he drank,
There until he sank down on.
So he lay at rest,
Then it was a delight,
How it small people are repelled,
‘t In’ t chalk standing noted,
How it pondered,
How it appropriate,
To room and buffetkas
Weather was just pure and
And where they looked but around,
Every thing was good in the place again.
Sat once a tailor in pain,
Because a suit had to be ready soon
He slate but it drape down with him
And went to ‘t snore like a bear.
Went with a seesaw
‘t Kleine-folk to the cut;
She tucked and stung,
They zoomed and suffocated,
Garneerden,
Watt migrants,
And pierced and sewed,
And squeezed and twisted
At night through – if the tailor stood on,
Had the Sinjeur ‘t new suit already.
Oh dear, now done that time;
‘t Leprechaun People is to the moon!
One can not loafing more,
It should present themselves busy;
Currently some will,
Not to sit still,
Who keep themselves awake dough,
That stir themselves …. the wretch!
That gape,
That her lie,
Clean it long hour of rest there,
Is not ready for his work. –
So, boys, girls! keeps you well,
And do your duty with courage frischen.
After reading the authors’ first draft of “By Hand & Eye,” a curious question occurred to me:
Can a book teach someone to sing?
Throughout this book, George Walker and Jim Tolpin use music as a metaphor to explain the mechanics of design. The metaphor is helpful in understanding their material, but I wondered if the metaphor exposed a weakness in their method. Namely, that design, like music, is something you can develop only through the act of doing it and gauging the response of others to your work.
But as I read the book for the third time during the editing process, I realized that Walker and Tolpin have indeed created a book that can teach you to sing. And they have done three things that no other book on furniture design has accomplished.
1. They refuse to accept that furniture design is a system of secret codes and numbers that merely need to be applied at the drafting table to create beauty. Or that design is innate and un-teachable.
2. They reveal a much simpler system – similar to notes on a scale – that can guide your efforts to train your hand, eye and mind to create pleasing forms.
3. They give you a roadmap (instead of a plane ticket) for you to follow in the journey ahead. They show you the musical scales you need to practice. They show you how the instrument works. And they even play a few of the scales to show you the results.
The next steps, however, are up to you. Take this book, try the exercises and see if they can teach you to sing at the drafting board. The trip ahead might be long, but with this book (and some traveling music, perhaps) you won’t ever get lost.
“By Hand & Eye” by George R. Walker and Jim Tolpin is now for sale in the Lost Art Press store for $34 with free domestic shipping until May 30, 2013, which is when the book is scheduled to ship from the printer.
You can read more about the book and order a copy here.
You can download a sample chapter in pdf format using the link below.
P.S. We will be offering 26 leather-bound copies of “By Hand & Eye” this summer for $185, and we’ll also offer electronic versions in both ePub and Kindle versions. We do not know if any (or all) of our retailers will carry the book. As always, it is their call – not ours.
“By Hand & Eye” is 200 pages long with full-color illustrations printed on heavy #80-pound matte coated paper. The book is casebound and Smythe sewn so it lasts a long time. The hardback boards are covered in cotton cloth with a black matte stamp. Like all Lost Art Press books, “By Hand & Eye” is produced and printed entirely in the United States.
“A roughly made bench serves the same purpose as an elegant Hepplewhite chair and has its own beauty. But how wonderful that the learned hands of humankind can fabricate something that has real craft and hard-won beauty.”
— Robert Genn
There are many reasons to take up design, but the one that applies to every artisan at every level is quality. In our modern sense, design is often coupled with creating something unique or new. But for much of our history this wasn’t the case; quality was the hallmark of good design.
Woodworkers who craft reproductions seldom think of themselves in that modern design context. Yet one somehow recaptures the light and fire of an original masterpiece, while another builds a lifeless copy. Sort of like the difference between a masterful rendition of a great concert piece and the mechanical sound coming from a player piano. The difference is usually in the design knowledge brought to each workbench.
Regardless of whether you create original furniture designs, interpret masterful works from our tradition, or simply make small changes to make your furniture sing; design is the one ingredient that combines with our toolset and skillset to make a whole greater than the sum of it’s parts. Simply put, design is that final piece that enables you to do your best work.
— George R. Walker
Editor’s note: ‘By Hand & Eye” is now at the printer. We are continuing to work on the very complex cover I’ve devised, which is why we haven’t put the book up for sale in the store. Look for it early next week for $34 and free U.S. shipping.
Editor’s note: After more than two years of work, we are about to send “By Hand & Eye” to the printer. This 200-page book by George R. Walker and Jim Tolpin is unlike any other woodworking book I have ever edited, read or even thought about. It seeks nothing less than to change the way you see the world around you. As you might know, we are not fans of systems of designing furniture that rely on (bogus) secret formulas. There are “formulas” out there, but they are hidden in plain sight. “By Hand & Eye” is the “purloined letter” of furniture design.
In the coming days (perhaps tomorrow) we will offer this book for sale here in our store, with our regular pre-publication offer of free domestic shipping. Until then, here is a missive from author Jim Tolpin on the book.
— Christopher Schwarz
At right is the sign on the door that greets students as they arrive for our “By Hand & Eye” design workshops (which we offer here at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking and through Goddard College’s Port Townsend extension). For these folks (and for George and I), one of the most appealing and exciting things about this pre-industrial artisan’s approach to furniture design (as opposed to the typical and ubiquitous Industrial Arts approach) is the absence of mathematics. For many would-be woodworkers measuring to – and deriving divisions or multiples of – fractional dimensions and numbered angles is a huge stumbling block. It takes the fun right out of it in fact! That, and the effort of coming up with proportions – from the overall shape of the piece to the size of its internal elements such as rails and stiles, legs and drawer faces.
But in the artisan’s language of design and layout, if you can count to 12 and divide it up into whole-number ratios (and “12” is very amenable to these operations compared to “10,” by the way), you pretty much have a handle on all the math you’ll need to design anything from a cradle to a coffin to any furnishing in between. All the proportions needed to create durable and appealing wooden structures spring quickly and intuitively from a single dimension that responds to a functional constraint (you can only lift a pot of soup so high to put on a serving credenza) or to fit a certain space – as was the situation with my last project.
I’ve just finished constructing this all-hand-tool project: a Honduras mahogany bookcase to fit between two trim elements in our living room. So how did the design process go? Here’s how:
I started by taking a measurement of the available width. Wait, I take that back. I just stuck a stick across the wall and made a mark on it – I have no idea what the number, is and I still don’t. I then subtracted the overhangs my mouldings would produce (ascertained from a full-scale drawing of them) and that established the outside width of the case. I made the height of the case twice that distance (a 2:1 ratio – a nice, dramatic octave). The height of the base moulding is 1/12th the height, and the side stiles are 1/12th the width as is the top rail showing below the top cornice mouldings. The depth of the case fits the biggest book I intend to put in it, and the shelf spacing is adjustable. That’s it. The design was done. In less that half an hour I was off to the shop to do some woodworking.
This design language is not about magical rectangles; it’s not about arithmetic derivations; and no, it’s not about working to prescriptive formulas, either. It’s just simple, generative geometry that is just as much fun to do now as it was when you first met up with it in first grade! Welcome to the real (and reasonable) world of rational (i.e. able-to-ratio) numbers.
“By Hand & Eye” will ship from our printer on Tuesday, May 21. So if you would like to order the book with free domestic shipping, you should place your order before midnight Tuesday. After Tuesday, domestic shipping will be $7.
