Category: Campaign Furniture

 

Just like woodworking, publishing is a fractal. You can get lost in the tiniest of details inside of details. And when I say “lost,” I mean the good kind of lost. Like this.

Most of my career has been on the newspaper and magazine side of publishing, where the level of detail work isn’t (and cannot be) in the same league as a designer such as Wesley Tanner, who designed “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” But I’m coming around.

Today I flushed out some rough ideas for the cover of “Campaign Furniture.” These are rough. And did I mention they were not smooth? Rough. The idea is to make the cover look like the top of a traveling chest or trunk. Corner guards are placed at the corners and there is something in the center – either an Anglo-Indian pull or a plate with curved corners and the title of the book.

Yes, I might add screws to the pull or plate. Or I might not muck it up with too much detail. Everything is hand-drawn, which will work nicely with the dies that do the debossing on the cover.

I’ve also been sorting through all the color choices that are possible with this cover. Right now I’m leaning toward a cotton cover that will be a color called “mudpie” – it’s a brownish-red and looks like a lot of the 19th-century British woodworking books on my shelf. The stamp will likely be something coppery or gold-ish. Maybe. Or black.

Or I’ll put a giant smiling narwhal on the cover that’s pooping rainbows.

It could go either way.

— Christopher Schwarz

“Campaign Furniture” is now completely designed – all 312+ pages of it – and goes to the indexer tomorrow morning. With any luck, the book will go to the printer during the first week in February and be released the first week of March 2014.

In the coming weeks I’ll post the table of contents of the book, sample pages in pdf format and photographs of all the projects. But until then, here are some details.

Starting with this book, we have decided to eliminate the pre-publication ordering process for all Lost Art Press titles. It seems that no matter what we told customers when they placed a pre-publication order (“Your book will arrive after such-and-such a date”), we were always overwhelmed by people asking: “Hey, where’s my book?”

So here’s what we’re going to do: “Campaign Furniture” will be available for purchase on the day it arrives in our warehouse. All orders placed during the first 30 days after the release date will receive free domestic shipping. Bottom line: We’re still offering free shipping for early adopters. But we’re not going to take your money until the book is in our hands.

Technical Specifications for ‘Campaign Furniture’
Here are specifications for “Campaign Furniture.” The book will be in 6” x 9” format and more than 312 pages long (we still have to add the index). It will be printed on #60 coated paper that has a matte finish – likely the same paper we used for “By Hand & Eye.”

The interior will be in full color. All photos of finished furniture, plus historical paintings and engravings, will be printed in full color. Step-by-step construction photos will be printed using a duotone (think Woodworking Magazine).

The book will be hardbound – casebound and Smythe sewn. No, it will not have a deckle (rough) edge. The book’s endsheets will be either colored or printed; I’m still working that out. We are still shooting for a retail price of $32, but we don’t have all of our printing quotes completed yet.

As to the book’s availability, we will offer it to all of our retailers worldwide. Whether they decide to carry the book is entirely up to them.

And I will be taking a massive nap tomorrow. And answering e-mails. And putting photo equipment away so I can get back to building furniture.

— Christopher Schwarz

Woodworker Mike Siemsen devised a clever way to make a three-way bolt for a folding stool using some off-the-rack hardware. He’s making 100 of these hardware sets for Lost Art Press, which we will sell for $12/each plus domestic first-class shipping, as soon as they are available.

When we sell out, Mike will sell them himself.

He sent me a sample hardware set and I installed it on a stool. The hardware works great. It is much less sloppy than the eye-bolt solution outlined in earlier posts. If you have a drill press, some lettered drill bits and a metal tap, you can easily make this hardware yourself using the instructions from Mike below. Note that this hardware is designed for legs that are 1-3/16” in diameter – a good diameter for modern Americans.

If you don’t have the tools or time, we’ll sell the hardware to you. Details to come. Below is how to make your own.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here is a shot of the tri-bolt set up. The parts required are:

• A 1/2-13 heavy hex nut. (Regular nuts will not work well; get low carbon, not hardened)
• Three 5/16-18 x 2-1/4” bolts (machine screws, get low carbon, not hardened)
• One 5/16-18 nut (for cutting off the bolts to length)
• Three 5/16″ washers.

You will also need a 5/16-18 tap, a drill for the pilot hole (F-size bit which is .257”; 1/4″ will probably work) and a drill press.

Center punch the center of every other face on the 1/2″ heavy hex nut, put it in a drill press vise and bore the pilot holes for the tap. You can then either run the tap by hand or put the tap in the drill press and turn it by hand, no power! Keep things square to the face being drilled.

Next take the three 5/16 bolts, screw the nut on them all the way up to the unthreaded portion and saw off the excess end. Remove the nut and file or grind the burr off. It is important that the unthreaded portion be around 1-1/4″ long. You can buy shorter or longer bolts to vary the length of the unthreaded portion. I typically blacken shiny hardware.

— Mike Siemsen

When your wife can control her urge to even slightly roll her eyes when you talk about the East India Company, and your hemorrhoids are as big as baseballs, it is time to cease work on your book.

I do not like sitting on my butt for hours, days and weeks. In fact, that was the reason I never fully enjoyed being a newspaper reporter. I adore a good millworks fire (who doesn’t?), but there were weeks when I would sit on my rump, handset smashed to my ear, saying, “And how did you get that candle dislodged from your insides?”

I’ve spent every waking hour of the last month on boring minutiae that isn’t worth writing about. I have executed more than 75 hand drawings. Processed hundreds of photos, and scanned more than 200 pages of material for the appendices to “Campaign Furniture.”

It sounds like I’m whining. I’m not. I enjoy the complete control over every pixel of a book, but I also know that you don’t want to read about the Pantone swatch I chose for the duotones in a book. This is a blog about woodworking. And killing Raney Nelson.

So here is a quick update on things you might be interested in.

1. I’m on schedule. “Campaign Furniture” will be designed and to the printer by the end of January, which means it will be released in early March 2014. I am trying like heck to bring in the book at less than $32 retail, but it is a challenge. We need to use matte-finish coated paper to reproduce the color and duotone photographs, and we won’t skimp on the binding or cover.

2. We are working on a special promotional piece of hardware. We plan to offer 100 U.S.-made tri-bolts for making campaign stools at a really nice price – $12. I have installed one of these on a camp stool, and I like it more than the eye-bolt solutions I’ve been using in the past. Stay tuned.

3. Other books are moving along. Peter Galbert is finishing up the writing on his book on chairbuilding. Andrew Lunn is wrapping up his tome on saws. Don Williams is (today) entering his last edits on “Roubo on Furniture-making” before submitting it to peer review. Lots of other projects are stirring, but I don’t have updates on them to share with you.

4. We are building a new Lost Art Press web site. With the help of woodworker/codemonkey Ben Lowery, we will be launching a new web site that is simpler to use. This is a major step forward for Lost Art Press, which is taking a leap from being a tiny company to a significant one. We will still be only two guys with laptops, but we are on the verge of outsourcing a lot of things that have been filling our garages, basements and waking hours with grunt work. Customers will still deal only with us – John and Chris – but we think shipments will be delivered faster and in better boxes – with no additional charges to you. Lest you think we are turning our back on our core principles, we will be using a local and independent company founded by two guys to do our fulfillment. When John called them last, one of the owners had his mouth full of bacon.

5. I need to thank you, our customers. I know it is old hat for a business to thank its customers, but I have a more personal appeal. Thirty months ago I walked out on the best job I’ve ever had – the editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine. I didn’t leave because I was unhappy. I left because I wanted to stretch things further than any sane/solvent corporation would let me. The only thing that has made Lost Art Press possible has been you. If you have bought a book from us in the last five years, your money has gone to support the crafts of woodworking, printing and publishing in the United States. Your support is also funding some incredible research that will become public in the years ahead.

So I need to get back to processing digital photos and find the unexpired tube of witch hazel cream to smear in my nether regions. You paid for that, too. Sorry to bring it up.

— Christopher Schwarz

This book is not a celebration of war any more than driving a Volkswagen or Porsche is a celebration of the Third Reich.

The plain fact of the matter is that conquest and defense are rich sources of innovation, improvisation and technological advances. The moulded plywood of Charles and Ray Eames was used by the Navy in World War II for splints and stretchers. That knowledge was turned to making moulded plywood furniture, including the iconic Eames chair.

The needs of the British Empire and its far-flung colonies created a style of furniture that was rugged, beautiful and stripped of ornament. There is little doubt in my mind that the utilitarian and plain aspects of campaign furniture represent the roots of Danish modern, Bauhaus and other 20^th-century design trends.

So I do not regret the 28 months I spent researching, building and writing this book. I think the campaign furniture style is one of the most important and overlooked furniture movements of the last 200 years.

But I do have regrets.

When I set out to build the projects for this book, I consciously set aside my aversion to exotic tropical hardwoods. When I write about a historical style, I immerse myself in it as much as possible so I can understand it from the inside. That means ignoring well-known rules about wood movement, technological advances in adhesives and (in this case) deforestation.

When I reject my modern prejudices I usually find gold. I think the past has a lot to teach us. Time and again, I’ve found that old ways of woodworking are usually smarter, more nuanced and more practical than our own.

But when it comes to selecting wood for a project, I’m not so sure. Most pieces of campaign furniture were built using mahogany, camphor, teak, padauk, oak or walnut. The exotics on this list were beyond plentiful in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. (Imagine teak being cheaper than red oak.) The supply at the time seemed almost limitless when you read the accounts of the day.

I know that we furniture makers are not the primary offenders when it comes to stripping the land of tropical hardwoods. But I also know that writing a book featuring tropical hardwoods is no small affair.

So as you are picking out the wood for your first (or next) piece of campaign furniture, consider this: walnut. American and European walnut was a common staple of the campaign furniture trade, and so it’s an appropriate and beautiful choice.

Here in the Ohio River valley, we have so much walnut that we used it to frame houses and make sash. Heck, I have a pile of walnut in my shop that is bigger than a car.

If you choose to use mahogany or another exotic, consider looking for recycled lumber. Some of the wood in this book came from a (trashed) recycled dining set I purchased from a woodworker who finally decided to lay down his tools.

That old and recycled mahogany was darker, finer and more beautiful than any other modern stick of mahogany I have laid my hands on. So finding recycled wood can actually improve your finished piece (as opposed to using old McDLT boxes to make a garden bench).

In the end, it is your choice. I encourage you to ignore every word I have just written and do your own research to make an informed choice.

I don’t want blinded readers anymore than I want to spend a single day living in a totalitarian regime. You are free to make a choice about what you build, how you build it and what materials you use to build. So make it.

— Christopher Schwarz