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?).
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.
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.
John and I really should avoid alcohol when we discuss our business.
One of the first books we discussed publishing in 2007 was securing the rights to publish some of the fantastic writing of Charles H. Hayward, who was editor of The Woodworker magazine from 1936 to 1966. Lots of people have pirated his work (you know who you are shamey, shame, shame), but an authorized reprint hasn’t happened.
Could it be done? Thanks to the IPA we were drinking, we decided to try. John spent months negotiating the rights. I collected every copy of The Woodworker I could get, many of them bound into annual editions.
Then the real work began.
I won’t bore you with the details of the last seven years, but last night I printed out the first 771 pages of Vol. 1, Tools and Techniques for copy editing. We still have 400 pages left to design – an arduous process because we are rebuilding the pages from the ground up. This isn’t a scan-and-jam, print-on-demand book.
This first volume will be 1,100 pages – the maximum our bindery can handle. The second volume will be 700 pages.
Each time we touch this work for editing or design, we are personally amazed. This first volume might be 1,100 pages at 8.5” x 11”, but the density of information makes it feel like 2,000 pages. Every illustration (there are thousands) and page is packed with woodworking, mainlined and right to the vein.
Our goal is to publish Vol. 1 in time for Christmas. I won’t have information on pricing or availability until late fall, so I’m going to ignore those questions from people who didn’t make it this far into the blog entry.
Vol. 2 will be next year. My next book will be 32 pages long with lots of doodle space.
After six years and hundreds of hours of work, our biggest publishing project is finally coming together.
“The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years” is a massive compilation of the best writing at The Woodworker magazine while Charles H. Hayward was editor, from 1936 to 1966. Many of the articles were written and illustrated by Hayward himself, but this authorized compilation also features stories from other great workshop writers such as Robert Wearing and W.L. Goodman.
When we say this project is big, we mean it. This 8-1/2” x 11” hardbound book will easily be more than 1,200 pages long and feature articles on all aspects of hand tool use, joinery, furniture styles and workshop philosophy.
The book has taken a team of people including myself, Megan Fitzpatrick, Phil Hirz, Ty Black, John Hoffman and Linda Watts years to put together. It started with us purchasing every single annual edition of The Woodworker from Hayward’s tenure, a $2,000 bill.
Then we spent many beer- and wine-soaked evenings sorting through all of the annuals, culling out the best articles, weeding out duplicates and trying to make a cohesive book that included a fair sample of Hayward’s pioneering publishing work.
That was the easy part.
Ty Black scanned all of the articles and wrote a program that would process the images and turn the stories into editable text, which then had to be compared against the originals.
And now Linda Watts is laying out the entire book in a cohesive, vintage-looking package that will present Hayward’s work to a new generation of hand-tool users.
I will be honest: We bit off more than we could chew with this book. It would have been easy to scan all the articles and reprint them as-is. We took the hardest and most expensive road possible in resetting all the text, reprocessing each image and creating new page layouts.
“The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years” will be published this fall. We don’t have pricing information. But you might want to start saving your dimes and English pesos now. It will be worth it.
As a small taste, here are all of the sections of the book:
We’re going back on press for a second printing of “Campaign Furniture” with a few corrections and a slightly different cover. The only significant correction, which was to the Roorkee Chair chapter, is discussed here. I also added a thank you to Greg Miller, who I neglected to include in the first printing.
I’m telling you all this because we have some customers who collect first editions of our books (no, we don’t have any first-edition copies of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” hidden here).
The new cover replaces the image of the chest pull with the title of the book. We’re also switching inks used for the cover stamp. The new ink will be more matte and coppery – less gold.
Also, the third printing of “By Hand & Eye” should be back in stock next week. And the expanded “With the Grain” is right on its heels.
In news on new projects, Peter Galbert’s “Chairmaker’s Notebook” is almost completely designed and should be headed to the printer within a couple weeks. As I type this I’m scanning the last of about 500 hand-done drawings for this book. I promise, this book will be worth the wait. The book will be 8-1/2” x 11”, hardbound with a dust jacket and more than 350 pages (perhaps close to 400). No word on pricing, yet.
Designer Wesley Tanner has begun work on designing Don Williams “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.” It will be ready for Handworks and the exhibit of the cabinet and workbench. Come to Handworks, see the cabinet and get your book signed.
“Roubo on Furniture” is awaiting some final work by the translating team before going to the designer. And our massive book on Charles Hayward will head to the designer as soon as Linda finishes designing Peter Galbert’s book (sorry about the workload, Linda and Wesley).
We have another dozen projects in various stages of completion, but these are the most immediate.
