The authors of “By Hand & Eye” and “By Hound & Eye” have launched a beautiful and informative new website that you should add to your browser or RSS feed.
The website is appropriately called “By Hand & Eye Online” and you can get there via http://www.byhandandeye.com. At this point the website consists of an active blog maintained by Jim Tolpin and George Walker who are writing about the interesting pre-industrial design techniques they have been exploring together for several years.
At the moment the two are creating a six-part online series called “Tricks & Truths” that will further extend your knowledge of artisan geometry. While the online course isn’t ready yet, you can sign up to be notified when it is released here.
We at Lost Art Press have been greatly heartened and a bit surprised at how well George and Jim have connected with readers on the topic of design. (Design books are typically commercial duds.) Whenever I travel I hear customers rave about the techniques their books explore, which are based on simple whole-number ratios instead of magic formulas or art school mumbo-jumbo.
If you are interested in going deeper into their world, I highly recommend you check out their new site, read the blog and consider taking the online course when it becomes available. Jim and George are fanatics about this stuff, and it shows in the quality of their writing and teaching.
“By Hound and Eye” isn’t for everyone. If you’re a geometry whiz or an 18-century cabinet maker, you probably won’t learn anything new from the workbook. I’ve created a three-question quiz to help each blog reader decide whether or not “By Hound and Eye” will be worth its $20 price tag to you ($10 for the pdf alone):
Do you already use a sector and a divider to layout your designs?
Can you readily produce a set of full-scale measured drawing from the sketch of the writing desk below?
Can you write out the musical harmony literally embedded in the desk below?
If you answered “yes” to all three questions, “By Hound and Eye” might underwhelm you.
I probably should have learned all of these skills two years ago when I first picked up “By Hand and Eye.” But I didn’t. Tolpin and Walker’s prose was so eloquent that I imagined I was already seeing “the music frozen in furniture.” Thanks to their persuasiveness, I became a haughty, complacent reader. I didn’t do the exercises on page 28, let alone the dozens suggested in the following 150 pages.
By the final section, I felt completely underwhelmed by the simplicity of the projects, which seemed so straightforward that any electron-slaying woodworker could produce each of them in just a long afternoon. Instead of seeing design proportions, I saw easy joinery. Instead of hearing music, just the hum of my table saw.
In “By Hound and Eye,” Walker and Tolpin take the inverse approach. Instead of telling you about the music of furniture, they teach you how to read and write your own. After my first time through the book, I still cannot answer “yes” to questions 1 and 3 above. And I never had a singular “aha” moment of the sort Chris described. But I imagine I will, once I work my way through them another three or four times. This is math, after all, and translating theory into skills takes multiple rounds of practice (at least for me).
A final note: If you’re one of those brave souls who has already broken free of the rectangularity of arts-and-crafts designs, you might benefit particularly from Section III of the workbook, “Curves.” It was in those pages that I felt most inspired and, paradoxically, still more than a little ignorant.
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Image credits: Author’s photograph of hand forged dividers by Seth Gould; detailed crop from Raphael’s masterpiece “The School of Athens,” Images from By Hound and Eye, illustrated by Andrea Love.
I’m a mathematical Einstein. More specifically, like Einstein’s mother. When she was 2.
In middle school, I whizzed through geometry. But then came algebra. When I nearly failed calculus, my dad promised I’d still become the next Gary Kasparov. It turns out, not so much. After I flicked the bird to Combinatorics and P-Chem in college, I prayed that I’d never have to “do math” again. And so it went for fifteen years. Then I met “By Hound & Eye.”
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I printed out the excerpt Chris posted. It was fast, fun and addictively satisfying. Like crack. Er, I mean Sudoku, that first time you played it. Armed with nothing more than a pen, some napkins and a pair of chopsticks, I’m now equipped to show all my art historian friends how mankind first invented that perfect 90° angle.
If, like me, you tend to think descriptively, you might want to approach By “Hound & Eye” as if it were titled “Da Vinci For Dummies” or “Shop Trignometry 101.” The entire exercise on squaring circles, pages 41-55, took me nine minutes to complete. The second time, just two minutes. So that brought my total investment to 121 minutes. Oh wait, did I forget to mention what I did for the first 110 minutes of insomnia? That’s how long it took me to find a compass.
The problem is that I’ve thrown all my compasses in the waste bin. The most recent iteration was a “Made in Germany” model by one of my favorite writing brands. I’d paid about $30 for it at a nice art store, in hopes of improving my Arabic calligraphy. But man, that compass was one of the most frustrating, imprecise, cheap-#@$ pieces of %^&@ I’ve ever purchased. I tolerated it for five years. Then last summer, after seeing my three year old draw a better circle by hand, I chucked it in the trash. It turns out globalization has brought us not only thousands of tool-like-objects, but also millions of writing-like-instruments.
So last night I spent 90 minutes scouring the house in hopes that my wife still had a cheap compass squirreled away somewhere. Turns out, I must have thrown hers away too. (Yes, I have a bad habit of burning things that don’t work. I know some people resell their junk on e-Bay, but I just can’t bring myself to pretend – even to a complete stranger – that an object that doesn’t do what it was designed to do is worth even a penny.)
Around minute 90, I started deliriously screaming expletives in the basement. I’d forgotten it was 2:15 a.m. Startled, my pregnant wife wobbled downstairs to find out what the crisis was. I explained. Confused, she asked me, “Don’t you have a bunch of those in your workshop?” “No,” I replied, “Those are dividers. A compass is like dividers but with a pencil on one side.” Still bleary eyed, she yawned for fifteen seconds, then went into my office, picked up a pencil and handed me a roll of scotch tape. I blushed.
This now-obvious solution works better than any compass I’ve ever owned. First I used a wooden pencil and the tape. Then I found that a mechanical pencil with rubber bands was even sturdier and faster to adjust. Both variants allowed me to draw the concentric circles on p. 46 on my very first try.
So, if you haven’t completed the excerpt yet, here’s my promise: it will only take you 10 minutes. That’s assuming you already have a Starrett 85. Otherwise, this exercise will take you 12 minutes, because you’ll have to first spend two minutes making your own compass.
Oh, and save some trees. Unless you want to use the excerpt as a coloring book, the only pages you’ll need to print out are pp. 46, 48, 51 and 56. Go get ‘em, Albert.
— Brian Clites, your new moderator and author of TheWoodProf.com blog
Since returning home Saturday I have been pushing hard to get “By Hound & Eye” to the printer so we will have it out in time for Woodworking in America – yes, we are attending, and yes we will have a booth this year.
We are still cleaning up some 192 scans for the press, but this morning I finished work on both the front cover (above) and back cover of this fantastic workbook.
“By Hound & Eye” is, as I said, a workbook. If you follow the instructions of Journeyman and his sarcastic dog, Snidely, you will get a first-class education in the basic geometry required to design well-proportioned furniture. To do the exercises, which are fun, all you need is a pencil, a compass and a straightedge.
Even if you have nearly memorized “By Hand & Eye” (I have), you will find amazing new things to explore, especially when it comes to drawing fair curves. The explanation in this book is the best I’ve seen. And it’s even better that you are being schooled by a cartoon dog.
If you struggled with the concepts in “By Hand & Eye” or didn’t do the exercises, I think you’ll benefit from this workbook. If your nickname at the woodworking club is “Euclid,” then skip it.
The entire book is hand-printed and illustrated by Andrea Love, an artist in the Pacific Northwest. “By Hound & Eye” marks many “firsts” for Lost Art Press. Here are the details.
This is our first softcover book. The authors, George Walker and Jim Tolpin, wanted it to be something you would feel comfortable drawing in when doing the exercises. So we chose a paper that takes pencil marks nicely.
The authors also wanted the book to be durable so it wouldn’t fall apart while you are working. Most softcover books are merely glued together and the covers are ironed on. We wanted better.
So we are using our traditional sewn binding – plus glue and a woven fabric tape – to keep the pages together. You will be able to bend the binding so the book lays flat.
The book is 192 pages, 8.5” x 11” and produced entirely in the United States. The price will be $20. Sorry, but we cannot offer the workbook in a package deal with “By Hand & Eye.”
We are still trying to calculate if we can offer free shipping during the first 30 days it is on sale. Stay tuned.
When Jim Tolpin and George Walker first presented the idea of “By Hand & Eye” to me it was going to be a book filled with big ideas plus exercises that you would perform right in the book itself.
After I tried many ways to make this happen at a reasonable cost, we decided that “By Hand & Eye” would instead present the big ideas in a nice hardbound format and explain the exercises that you should do on a separate sheet of paper.
Some readers did the exercises (and had their eyes opened). Others skipped the exercises and were confused or frustrated.
To remedy this, George and Jim have been hard at work for more than a year to create a workbook to accompany “By Hand & Eye.” We are in the final stages of production with this workbook, and it’s been a fun and enlightening project.
Called “By Hound & Eye: A Plain & Easy Guide to Designing Furniture with no Further Trouble,” the workbook is an illustrated cartoon journey through the world of pre-industrial design geometry. It stars Journeyman and his pizza-loving dog, Snidely, as they untangle the world of points, segments, arcs and the three-dimensional world using nothing more than a compass, straightedge and pencil.
After each new idea is introduced, you are shown how to perform the exercise yourself right in the workbook.
As someone who has edited the book and done all the exercises, I can say only this: It is genius.
You can perform all the exercises in an afternoon. And even though I’ve been steeped in this geometry stuff for years, I experienced several eye-opening moments while performing the exercises. Reading about it is one thing. Doing it is another (like woodworking). Also fun: George and Jim have given their work the look and feel of a middle-school workbook, complete with slightly corny jokes.
The workbook will be inexpensive (less than $20), printed in the United States and will be our first softbound book. (Sidebar: We considered many other options, including spiral binding and other exotic binding technologies. They were nice but incredibly, stupidly expensive.)
The workbook is being hand illustrated and hand lettered by Andrea Love, who animated and produced this charming video for “Hand & Eye” that you might recall. She’s in the final stages of inking all the pages of the workbook. Unless something goes completely off the rails (likely involving an alien abduction), “By Hound & Eye” will be released before the end of 2015.
