Stools that have an X-frame for the base are some of the oldest pieces of seating furniture (aside from a stump and buttocks). Sometimes called a “curule,” they were, quite literally the seat of power in Roman times.
These X-style seats have long been produced in metal and wood and were very common campaigning items, according to the Army & Navy Co-Operative Society catalogs. The stool shown above is featured in the 1907 catalog and cost 2 shillings and 1 pence (the catalog entry is shown on page 304 of my book, “Campaign Furniture”).
Thanks to dumb luck, I acquired one of these stools for $25 and have been traveling with it every since. It is remarkable.
When assembled, the stool is 16” high, 15” wide and 8” deep. It can hold my weight (and more) with ease. When knocked down, it is 12” x 8” x 1-1/2”. The stool weighs less than 4 lbs.
I’m bringing this stool, my Douro chair and some pieces of furniture I built to the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Charleston, S.C. Details are here. On the day before the event, I’m giving a free lecture on the origins of campaign furniture at the American College of the Building Arts. The public is welcome. Details on that lecture are here.
The first campaign chest I built I used sledge feet – simple square blocks that raised the lower case off the ground.
Soon after, I received a pleasant note stating that I had made an amateur mistake. Campaign chests with sledge feet were merely missing their turned feet.
I felt like a fool at first. It was like sculpting a female torso and leaving off the naughty bits. After recovering from my shame, I started looking around at original source material.
First I checked my copies of the Army & Navy Co-Operative Society catalogs. Sure enough, all the chests shown in my copies had turned feet that screwed into blocks in the bottom of the lower chest unit.
But something else nagged at me.
As you know, we love old paintings and drawings here at Lost Art Press. Thanks to Jeff Burks, Suzanne Ellison and our own efforts, we have amassed many hundreds of images relating to woodworking from Roman times to the present. These are important, if sometimes flawed, documents that are as important as written, if sometimes flawed, accounts.
An Officer’s Quarters at Newry, Northern Ireland, C. 1870
So I began scanning my library of paintings and drawings relating to campaign furniture. Sure enough, I immediately found several that showed campaign chests in use on their sledge feet – no turned feet.
There are several explanations: The turned feet were still in the lower drawer or had been destroyed by bugs or water. Or perhaps the owner of the chest was lazy or didn’t care for the feet. Or perhaps that chest was made without the turned feet.
No matter what the explanation, don’t feel like you are wrong if you don’t include them on your chest. Personally, I really like the feet, but some people are turned off by turning.
With “Campaign Furniture” shipping out of the warehouse (we should be current on orders by Monday), one would think I am sick of the style. Or that at least I would take a break.
Quite the opposite. When I finished my first book on workbenches in 2007, I plowed forward with research into other forms, which continues to this day. When I finished “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” in 2011, I built smaller chests, experimented with different tool-holding doo-dads and explored two Dutch versions.
So right now I’m building another folding bookcase, measuring my Douro chair and playing with a folding stool that I’ll be posting a video of soon. The stool is small enough to fit into a purse. Or my man-bag.
The folding bookcase (detail shown above), will be featured in a future issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine and is different than the one in my book. The new one is mahogany, has glass doors and has cool sawtooth shelf standards.
I hadn’t made this style of shelf standard before, and so I fretted about the angles, but they turned out to be so easy that a mouth-breather could do it, and they work very well. I’ll detail the process in the article and will be using these in future projects.
Sorry for the lame blog topic today – I was expecting an important package and I missed the mailman. So until tomorrow…. Or Saturday after Jeff’s posts.
Mark Firley of The Furniture Record blog has written up a piece on campaign furniture that is 100 percent false. Except the pictures. Go for the photos.
If you don’t subscribe to The Furniture Record, remedy that now. Firley travels the world with the obsessive goal of photographing every piece of furniture and every dovetail ever made. He collects his photos into sets on Flickr (120 sets as of today) that are a furniture-maker’s delight.
If I want to make a piece of furniture that looks nice, I look at 100 examples of that piece first – at a minimum. Only then will I see the bell curve of ugly, average and extraordinary. And only then will I know where my design falls on that curve.
The Furniture Record is a completely free jumpstart of your furniture education.
The first words of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” are “disobey me,” a paradoxical expression that underlies much of my favorite absurdist Russian literature. You can take the expression at face value, or you can think about it for a minute and consider that perhaps Gregor Samsa has not really turned into a cockroach.
When I finished writing “Campaign Furniture,” I wanted to begin the book with Alfred Korzybski’s dictum, “The map is not the territory.” But I decided to just play it straight and not include any discussion of semantics. The book itself is a straightforward discussion of the furniture and how to build it. I don’t think this book will get me in trouble like my last one did. So I didn’t include the Korzybski quote.
That doesn’t stop me, however, from talking about my unspoken motives for the book here on the blog. While the book (the map) is about campaign furniture, the uncharted territory it describes is far different.
After 15 years at Popular Woodworking, I concluded that our craft is strapped into a stylistic straightjacket (Shaker and Arts & Crafts) that does more harm than good. Now before you get your panties in a bundle, let me be clear about a couple things: There’s nothing wrong with either of those styles. I love them both. I also love Oreos, but an exclusive diet of them is a bad idea. Also, I was part of the problem. I wrote, approved and encouraged the publication of hundreds of pieces dealing with Shaker and Arts & Crafts.
So I also want to be part of the solution. “Campaign Furniture” is part of that. “Furniture of Necessity,” my next book, is the next step in that direction.
I want readers to explore other styles, even if it isn’t campaign style or vernacular furniture. There is a world of furniture styles out there that are begging to be built. And it’s furniture that beginners can handle. Danish modern, Bauhaus, Japanese Tansu, Chinese furniture (a fricking world of Chinese furniture) are just a few of the styles out there that don’t require an 18th-century apprenticeship to build and are beautiful.
And I’m willing to take a personal hit to my income to try to open your eyes.
If I were smart, I’d write a book on birdhouses, which usually sell twice as many units as any traditional woodworking book. Or I’d do another book on workbenches, Shaker furniture or Arts & Crafts.
Writing a book on an obscure furniture style is economic stupidity. If people don’t like the style, they won’t buy the book, no matter how good it is. Books on a furniture style (even Shaker) will always sell worse than books on skills, tools or workshops. Books on an obscure furniture style usually go from the printer right to the bargain bin. (Ever seen the fascinating book on Mormon furniture? That’s exactly my point.)
Today I received my copy of “Campaign Furniture,” and it doesn’t completely disappoint me. The printing job is nice. I like the end sheets. The binding looks good – not too much glue and the stitching is solid. So I’m drinking a Stone “Old Guardian” right now to celebrate the release of what could be a monumentally unsuccessful book.
I also take a sip to hope – that some of you are willing to step outside the narrow confines of our craft and start to explore the immense uncharted territory ahead of us.
These X-style seats have long been produced in metal and wood and were very common campaigning items, according to the Army & Navy Co-Operative Society catalogs. The stool shown above is featured in the 1907 catalog and cost 2 shillings and 1 pence (the catalog entry is shown on page 304 of my book, “Campaign Furniture”).
