Category: The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years

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.

— Christopher Schwarz

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:

1-Tools & Techniques
Sharpening
Setting-out Tools
Handplanes
Saws
Boring Tools
Carving
Turning
Veneering & Inlay
General Techniques
Miscellaneous Tools

2- Joinery
Panel Joints
Frame Joints
Dovetail and Carcass Joints
Miscellaneous Joints

3-Workshop Appliances & Storage
Workbenches & Workholding
Tool Chests & Storage
Appliances

4-Furniture & Details
Furniture Styles Styles
Projects & Drawings
Miscellaneous Details

5-Chips from the Chisel

And below is a bigger taste: The full table of contents for the book.

TOC

More details as they become available.

— Christopher Schwarz