Lost Art Press

Category: By Hound and Eye

The New ‘By Hand & Eye’ Website and Online Course

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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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.

Check out their blog here.

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.

— Christopher Schwarz

First Look: ‘By Hound & Eye’

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Our shipment of “By Hound & Eye” arrived from the printer while I was teaching overseas (yes, it was raining there. It was England). So it was only today that I got my first look at “By Hound & Eye,” the new workbook from George Walker and Jim Tolpin.

This book started out as a hair-brained idea explained to me by George Walker over a lunch of fried chicken, fried hominy and a couple beers at The Eagle in Cincinnati. (This is the place where John and I come up with our craziest money-losing ideas. See “Book of Plates.”)

By the end of the lunch, I was sold on George and Jim’s idea. This workbook was going to be the missing link between thought and action. If George and Jim could just convince readers to pick up a pencil and do some simple exercises, readers would take the first steps into a larger world.

But how? Luckily George and Jim were just crazy enough to drag animator and artist Andrea Love into the picture. Andrea, George and Jim created “Journeyman” and his dog “Snidely” as the mechanism to explain incredibly complex geometrical ideas using simple, almost-childlike lessons that I found myself doing, even while editing their rough text.

At that point – when Snidely and Jouneyman were just stick figures – I knew this book was a piece of fried gold. And somehow between classes and crises, we got this book to the printer.

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Believe it or not, this was the hardest part of the project. George and Jim wanted it to be an inexpensive, softcover workbook. We don’t do that here at Lost Art Press. We do hardcover. Nice paper. Sewn bindings. Blah, blah.

“By Hound & Eye” would be silly in a high-class presentation. But it had to be a quality workbook if it was going to have our name on it.

So what we made is, by publishing standards, a duck-billed platypus. It’s softcover and the text is printed on uncoated stock. But the softcover is printed with a supermatte coating (very expensive) and the binding is sewn so it’s as durable as our hardcover books. And the uncoated paper is the best stuff we could get (#60 basis weight).

So this tacky workbook ended up quite expensive to make and is nice in the hand. And we still brought it in at $20 retail (really, we should have made it $27….).

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We hope that those of you who ordered the book are enjoying it. I think it’s a hoot. But most of all I hope you are giving the exercises a go. That is the key to everything.

— Christopher Schwarz

‘By Hound & Eye’ is Here. Special Offer Ending

Posted on by Lost Art Press

HOUND_coverAWe’ve just received our shipment of “By Hound & Eye” – the cartoon workbook that will open your eyes to the hidden geometry behind excellent furniture.

The shipment is early – way early. We were expecting it in mid-September. And so we are going to end our special pre-publication offer early as well. (Sorry. FYI, when a book is late, we extend the pre-publication offer.)

So if you want a copy of “By Hound & Eye” with a free download of the book, you have until Sept. 4 to order. After that, the free pdf will not be available.

If you ordered a copy of “By Hound & Eye,” it will be packed up Monday and sent via SmartPost, which can take five to seven business days. We’ve also shipped out copies to all our retailers. We don’t know when they’ll add them to their stores, so keep a sharp eye out.

I haven’t seen the physical printed book (I’m in England right now). but I’m very much looking forward to seeing our first softcover workbook.

— Christopher Schwarz

Harmonic Proportions

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“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):

  1. Do you already use a sector and a divider to layout your designs?
  2. Can you readily produce a set of full-scale measured drawing from the sketch of the writing desk below?
  3. 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.

Hound Desk

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.

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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.

BootBenchIn “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).

Desk2A 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.