Lost Art Press

Category: Downloads

First Review of ‘Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker’

Posted on by fitz

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J. Norman Reid of Wood News Online reviewed Roy Underhill’s “Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker! – A Novel with Measured Drawings” for the most recent issue. Here’s a short excerpt:

“Fun, fast-moving and filled with vivid though sometimes arcane period details about farm machinery, computing and radio equipment, government agencies and cat faces staring out from marble walls, Roy creates unique and engaging characters whose fate propels the reader’s interest from one chapter to the next. Yet despite the heavy overlay of humor that pervades the story line and many of its details, the novel also bears a valuable social message as Calvin confronts the racism and anti-Semitism of the day.

“The ending, which I won’t reveal here, is both dramatic and—like the rest of the book—absurdly humorous. A wild ride indeed!”

You can read the full review here. The entire November 2014 issue of Wood News Online can be read here.

— Megan Fitzpatrick

p.s. Order before Nov. 29, 2014, for free domestic shipping; the book will start shipping on or around Nov. 10.

p.p.s. Not to be outdone by Chris (in this, anyway), here’s another short excerpt from the novel to tempt you:

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4 More Unprofitable Posters (Free for You & Shawn)

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Shawn Graham needs to decorate the walls of his woodworking school, Wortheffort in Austin, Texas. So I cleaned the scanner of drool after dealing with the cover for “Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker!” and have four new posters for you.

These are all suitable for 18” x 24” at 600 dpi – just perfect for the poster-printing machine at Staples, Office Depot or your other-named office supply house.

The first poster, shown above, is of an original image I purchased about four years ago. No picture better sums up the craft for me. A good bench. A huge pile of debris. A pair of dividers. A deer-in-headlights look that can be fixed only by a beer.

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The other three images were drawn by Charles H. Hayward and are from his “Recognising the Styles” series in The Woodworker magazine, which shows the stylistic development of a particular furniture form. Here we have posters on chairs, tables and sideboards.

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I hope to see these in the bathrooms of woodworking schools everywhere – just like I used to find copies of the November 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine in woodworking school bathrooms. A lot. Don’t know why.

— Christopher Schwarz

More Unprofitable Shop Posters!

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Because our poster experiment last week was so unsuccesful (I think six people sent me photos of their Hayward shop posters), we’ve decided to do it again – this time with original images from my collection that were already scanned and cleaned up for other projects.

Both images are French. One is Juliette Caron, who is said to be the first female “compagnon” (that’s French for “woodworking jedi”). She was so notable that there was a line of postcards showing her at work – I have two of these postcards and this is my favorite.

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The other image is of a beautiful French atelier – I love the benches and the bowsaws hanging above each student’s area.

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Both have been optimized to be printed at 18” x 24” at 300 dpi and are about 10 mb each. One reader noted that you can get these printed in black and white for only $2 at Staples. Dang. Color is $13.

— Christopher Schwarz

How to Make Money Making Posters!

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Every week a customer suggests we sell posters, postcards, calendars, stationary or sketchbooks that feature a piece of artwork or photograph from one of our Lost Art Press products.

It’s flattering, but we decline. During my tenure in publishing, I’ve studied this market and have concluded that this is how you make money on posters that do not feature kittens, human flesh or dumb motivational sayings.

  1. Select the most popular images from your publishing business; scale and clean the images so they will reproduce well on heavy coated paper stock.
  2. Find a press that can hold the line screen appropriate for a quality reproduction job.
  3. Purchase 2,000 posters so you can reduce the unit cost and charge less than $20 for the poster – a key price point.
  4. Sell 200.
  5. Warehouse the 1,800, running up a monthly fee to store them until your profit is gone and someone decides to pulp them.
  6. Sell a kidney.
  7. Profit!

Rather than lose another internal organ, let’s try this. Last night I made a high-resolution scan of one of the pages from this post on furniture styles. I scanned it at the maximum resolution we can handle, cleaned it up in Photoshop for about two hours and scaled it so it would print nicely at 18” x 24” – a common and inexpensive ($13) poster size at Staples.

You can download the high-resolution file here (it’s more than 50mb):

You have our permission to take it to a printer and have them make you a poster for your own use. If 50 people send me a photo of this poster on the wall of their shop, I’ll do another one for free. We lose less money this way.

— Christopher Schwarz

Furniture Styles: From Gothic to the 20th Century

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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After reading Charles H. Hayward’s writings during his tenure as editor of The Woodworker, I think he was of two minds about furniture. While the magazine was filled with plans for up-to-date pieces that would look at home on the set of “Mad Men,” Hayward also took pains to educate readers about old work.

One of the ways he did this was by drawing pieces from the collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum, and all of those drawings will be featured in our upcoming book on The Woodworker magazine.

He also published one-page drawings that showed how a particular form of furniture – tables, beds, chairs – changed during the centuries.

Today we offer a free download of seven of these pages compiled in one pdf. You can download it using the link below.

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One of the things you can see from the pdf is why we are so keen on publishing this book. The acid-based paper that these are printed on is deteriorating rapidly.

— Christopher Schwarz