A lot depends on the way we face up to experience. We can’t dodge it. We are all conscripts in the hands of destiny, and when destiny gives its marching orders we have to follow where it leads.
Men who long for peace are called to war, or they are barred by circumstances from following some work or profession on which their hearts are set. But because man is what Emerson calls “a golden impossibility” we still retain that liberty of spirit which gives us the last word.
A man may take experience like a sleep-walker, hardly conscious of the world outside himself, or he may skim it superficially and gain enough from it for his immediate ends, or he may take hold of it, use his eyes, his intelligence, his reason on it, so that out of it he wrests something that will remain with him like a finely tempered tool giving precision, certainty and drive to his actions. And with such a tool he begins to shape at last the destiny which began by shaping him – one of the things that it is good for us to remember when life is taking many into strange paths.
To quote a 17th century follower of Galen: “they who cultivate the good seeds which nature have set in them, prove not shrubs but Cedars in their generation. And to be in the form of the best of the Bad or the worst of the Good will be no satisfaction to them.”
The books arrived in our warehouse yesterday. John is preparing all the shipping labels, and the warehouse employees are preparing for an assembly-line packing process. They plan to have all books in the mail by Thursday, March 10. After that, it’s in the hands of the carrier.
If you have a problem with any Lost Art Press order, feel free to send an email to help@lostartpress.com. If you are trying to find out the status of your order for these books, the above update is all we can tell you right now.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Most of the books ordered by our retailers left the docks at the printer at the same time ours did. We have no way of knowing when the book will arrive at Lee Valley, Lie-Nielsen, Highland Hardware or any of our other retailers I’m afraid. Nor do we know when they will begin shipping.
All morning John and I struggled to get “The Anarchist’s Design Book” from the bindery and into our hands. Then this afternoon we got a simple message: “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years” (the other book we’re working on) has shipped from the printer and is on its way to our warehouse.
With any luck, “The Woodworker” books will arrive in the warehouse tomorrow and we can begin shipping our pre-publication orders on Friday or Monday.
Plus we should have copies of both volumes at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event and the opening of our storefront on March 11-12.
Setting my ego aside, “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years” is a tie with our Roubo translation for the most important work we’ve published. The two volumes of “The Woodworker” are more than 800 pages of detailed information you simply will not find anywhere else.
Editing this project was both an obligation and a delight during these last eight years. And I cannot wait for you to see them.
Perhaps because it is such an everyday material many people do not realise the importance of PAPER as a munition of war – not merely newspaper, but paper and cardboard of every kind. It is used in the manufacture of shell containers, fuse components, mines, radio sets, machine-gun belts, etc. and it is needed now. Woodworkers can make a definite contribution by using shavings to light their fires, and saving the paper. They can also exchange shavings for paper with their neighbors and add to the collection of paper to be used directly for the war effort.
We therefore appeal to all readers to go carefully through their rooms, drawers and cupboards and turn out every scrap of unwanted paper. Stack it in a dry place, and separate white paper from cardboard and brown paper. All local councils have organised schemes for collection. Please then do it now.
— The Woodworker, January 1942. The exhortation to turn in all unneeded paper is on page 4; the graphic is on page 5.
Most of us are haunted throughout our lives by the wide gap between what we feel we could do and the little we actually accomplish. “Man’s reach is wider than his grasp.” As children we embarked eagerly on cherished projects and when we failed from the lack of experience and skill were daunted and exasperated by our impotence. To feel within oneself the power to do a thing and then to make a hash of it!
Later, when our fingers had gained skill the problem posed itself in a different form. We might now have the knowledge and at least sufficient confidence to do a good job, but still there was something that eluded us, some secret vision of perfection to which, in spite of many efforts, we failed to attain. The trouble with perfection is that it looks so misleadingly simple, but the cost is high. We can spend quite a considerable part of our lives discovering just how high and that unless we are prepared to pay the price perfection will continue to elude us. Recently I came across a mathematician who, so that he might demonstrate some mathematical law to his class had made a wooden model which, in order to function, needed an upright board, grooved in zigzags set at certain angles, down which tiny balls cascaded to operate the model. It was not the main part of the model, merely the necessary prelude which made the demonstration possible, yet it had taken him, he said with a smile, three hundred hours to make. The wood was unpolished but so glossily smooth, with perfection in each incisive line along which the little balls capered, that it had a beauty all of its own. Obviously it had been a labour of love and infinite patience.
Usually it is our impatience that defeats us. There are so many other distractions tugging at us that it is difficult to devote ourselves unswervingly to one particular bit of creative work with the unhurried effort that a first-class job takes and we are content to give less than our best. The craftsman’s best needs something more than an acquired skill of fingers sufficiently well trained not to mar a job with rash, impatient movements. It needs besides an attitude of mind that can sustain a prolonged effort with enjoyment and when a man takes pleasure in his work for its own sake he has acquired the true craftsman spirit which makes the best work possible.
Even so, we have to accept our human limitations. They are different with every individual man, divergencies of talent, of temperament, of circumstances which must inevitably produce differences of achievement. The temptation is strong to say: “Ah, if I was that man, or had that gift, or that opportunity, I should do very differently.” Should we, I wonder? If, instead of sighing for the moon, we accept ourselves as we are, with our own gifts and potentialities, our own weaknesses and faults of temperament, and set ourselves to do the best creative work that lies inside of us in spite of them, we shall work with an awareness of ourselves that will be half the battle. The naturally impatient man has more patience to learn than his less impulsive brother, the man who yields so easily to discouragement has to make up his mind to grit his teeth and hand on and that “it’s dogged as does it.” We are all these things by turn and at times but in each of us the proportion is different. We are each, as it were, our raw material and by working creatively and setting ourselves to do good work we are shaping and making ourselves as well as the thing we do. In this way alone can we discover our hidden potentialities by learning to do the things which can give them release. It is their presence within us which gives us from childhood upwards that sense of power to do things which, given no outlet, may well prove illusory.
Lack of confidence or an impossible ambition may both cause failure but if we work realistically, accepting ourselves as we are, confidence will come or vaulting ambition learn a moderation that leads to success. As the power of achievement grows, we shall find that we have it in us to do work stamped with our own distinctive character, because character develops inevitably with the things we do, and that we shall be making a contribution in itself unique to our surroundings.
The only fatal thing is to give up trying, to allow that sense of innate ability to become submerged, turning to a feeling of frustration and finally indifference. By so doing we shall cheat ourselves of some of the best things in life.
Once started on the good road to craftsmanship there is no knowing where a man will stop. One thing has an odd way of leading to another, interests and accomplishments grow and thrive by the way. To the end of our days we shall probably feel conscious of the things we might have done and did not, but in so far as we were willing to pay the price of achievement we shall have something to show for having lived.
— Charles H. Hayward, The Woodworker, April 1955 issue (paintings dug up by Jeff Burks)
John has been inundated with customer emails asking when their copy of “
