Lost Art Press

Category: The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years

Face Our Past: For Better or Worse

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With “The Anarchist’s Design Book” in the rear-view mirror, I am double-clutching to get our Charles H. Hayward project to the printer as soon as possible.

After eight years of toil by a dozen people, we are almost there. I have only about 40 hours of work to do in order to get it to press. So I am eschewing the shop as much as possible (except for this sweet little diversion).

Our book on Hayward covers his entire editorial stint at The Woodworker, from the 1930s to the late 1960s. It was a period of incredible change in our craft, and you can see attitudes shift as the hand tools are put away and the machines begin to dominate.

However, Hayward loved handwork and insisted on filling the pages of the magazine with it even to the end of his tenure. So I think you will adore this book when it comes out.

Tonight I’m editing the section on glue blocks (yup, an entire section on glue blocks) and was struck by one of the articles called “The Weakest Link.” It’s one of those articles when you can see the old ways start to slip away.

What is “The Weakest Link?” It is joinery.

The article explains how joinery can weaken an assembly instead of strengthening it. Hayward points to studies in the United States that dealt with a door made up of a framework skimmed by plywood panels. (See Fig. 2 above.) Adding joinery to the piece does not add strength to the door, according to scientific studies. So perhaps we can or should skip it.

The assembly is dang ugly, however, no matter how strong it is.

In the same article, Hayward goes into immense detail in discussing glue blocks and offers details you don’t often see. For example: You should plane off the corner of the glue block just a shaving or two) that goes into the corner of the assembly to add strength. Duh. Why have I not thought of that?

To be sure, about 90 percent of the material in this book is about the best practices in woodworking – many times better than what is typical today. But it is interesting to see standards start to slip. Invariably what causes them to slip might surprise you: it’s science.

— Christopher Schwarz

Hermit’s Journal: Day 2

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Late Friday John and I arrived home after six days of backbreaking but inspiring work at the French Oak Roubo Project put on by Benchcrafted and Bo Childs of Barnesville, Ga.

It was my last scheduled trip until an indeterminate ever. If you want to see photos from this fantastic week, check out this Instagram feed.

What’s on the docket for me next? First I need to finish this workbench for a customer. (Oh, and to the commenter who suggested I’m getting rich off selling my work, I suspect you don’t do this for a living. You are more than welcome to pay my water bill this month, which would be a huge help.)

After the bench gets finished, I will dive into Lost Art Press’s three most-active books.

  1. Finish editing “Woodworker: the Charles Hayward Years.” Only 350 more pages to go! The book is all designed. I’m the problem.
  2. Complete the edit of “Woodworking in Estonia.” The book is entirely designed and just needs a final comb-over. I’m the problem.
  3. Finish laying out “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” I’ve laid out 10 of the 21 chapters. I just have to finish the beast. Again: The problem is me.

Thanks go out to Suzanne the Saucy Indexer for picking up my slack on this blog and doing a fine job. As I can eschew shaving and basic hygiene for the next year or so, I think I’ll be able to rapidly get these books done and out the door.

— Christopher Schwarz

Ploughing Through Hayward

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We haven’t forgotten about “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years” book – it’s just so massive that everything takes a long time to do. I think we are in our seventh year of working on this book now.

As penance, I offer up this awesome drawing from Hayward on making grooves.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. This is just a quick scan of the paper proof. Our real scans are much crisper.

Did the Router Beget the Handplane?

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At any idle moment, I dive into editing our massive Charles H. Hayward project. Unfortunately, I am the bottleneck in this project. Megan Fitzpatrick has edited the entire thing and entered most of her changes, but I am far behind her.

Perhaps I’m getting slow because I’m not on the front lines of editing a magazine any more.

In any case, I am deep in the book’s section on planes and enjoying the heck out of it. Maybe that’s the problem.

One of the articles sent me scurrying to my library to check a few sources on the history of the handplane, including a suggestion that the plane evolved from the router. That’s odd. Many other sources have suggested the adze was the stepping stone between the chisel and plane. So I had to look at some early routers (maybe this is what is slowing me down?).

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Take a look at the entire article (minus final edits) and get a preview of the nice vintage look we’re using for this massive project, which is weighing in at 891 pages.

And now I’ll stop blogging tonight, which is surely slowing me down.

— Christopher Schwarz

Charles H. Hayward: Duck, Duck, Goose

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“The distortion is way too clear.”

— Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

One of the criticisms frequently leveled at my writing is that I am not consistent.

The criticism is 100 percent true.

After writing many woodworking articles, blog entries and books during the last 20 years, things have changed. My work has changed. The tools available to us have changed. The way we communicate ideas has been transformed.

But still, I wish I had popped out of the womb knowing everything I know now – plus all the stuff I will learn before I die.

As a result, I am taking small comfort from editing the 800 pages of our forthcoming book “The Woodworker: The Charles Hayward Years.” When we selected the articles for the book we grabbed everything the magazine published during a 30-year span on some core woodworking topics.

All of these articles were filtered through the traditionally trained hands of Charles H. Hayward, the editor of the magazine and the author of most of the articles.

We decided not to change a single word of the writing, even when his articles contradicted one another. When you read this book, you might find this annoying at first – why didn’t we fix these blatant problems? After you pass through the stage of being annoyed, you might appreciate our approach.

Take, as an example, the topic of glazed oilstones. This comes up in about a dozen different articles.

At first Hayward says there is little you can do except send the stone back to the manufacturer for refurbishing. Then it becomes clear that his readers have schooled him for that comment. Later articles include all manner of reader-suggested solutions, including boiling the offending stone in a solution with washing powder and liquefying the glazed oil with a torch.

This happens over and again throughout the articles. It allows you to see the breadth of knowledge (or lack of it) in the very best 20th-century writing on handwork.

Hayward, unlike other some woodworking writers of his time and ours, refused to close his mind to other perspectives and techniques of his craft. He could have easily said: “This is how I learned to do it, and so this is the way to do it.” And he would have been right, and also above the criticism of being inconsistent.

But then I wouldn’t like Hayward as much. And we wouldn’t publish this book, which has been another multi-year “how-much-money-can-we-lose” odyssey.

Perfect consistency is for our robot overlords.

OK, back to the editing.

— Christopher Schwarz