The title of this post reminds me of my magazine-cover writing days. From the higher-ups: “Use numbers!” “Use exclamation points!” “Use the word ‘free!'” If only it were in neon yellow. But it gets the point across, which is simply this: We’ve added four new excerpts to some of our more-recent titles.
In the excerpt for “Making Things Work: Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life (Second Edition” by Nancy Hiller, you’ll find the Table of Contents and Chapter 1: The English Years, which includes “Living the Dream,” “The Accidental Cabinetmaker, I,” and “The Accidental Cabinetmaker, II: On the Brink.” I tried to paraphrase these selections but it’s Nancy and you can’t paraphrase Nancy. It’s 27 pages of intimate, funny, intelligent writing, perfect to read with this morning’s coffee.
The excerpt of Robert Wearing’s “The Solution at Hand” includes the Contents, Editor’s Note, Introduction and Chapter 1: Holding Devices. Try out Robert Wearing’s Planing Grip System or Bench Holdfast or Sticking Board. Read about them, build them –– everything you need to do is included (in fact, Chapter 1 includes 34 detailed illustrations).
We’ve also included an excerpt of “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown” by Christopher Williams. In addition to the Table of Contents, Preface by Nick Gibbs, Editor’s Note and Chapter 2: Introduction to Wales, we also included three columns from Chapter 5: John Brown, in his Own Words, so that you can get a feel for both Christopher’s words, and John’s. Plus you get to see several of Molly Brown’s gorgeous linocut illustrations.
And finally, we created an excerpt of “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years, 1936-1966.” It includes the Table of Contents, From the Publisher and “Charles Hayward Looks Back to the Seamy Side,” a three-part interview series with Charles Hayward, written by Antony Talbot, then editor of Working Wood, in Spring 1980. The excerpt also includes nine columns from 1962, which is one of my favorite chapters (it’s a perk that comes with being the one who makes the excerpts).
We began shipping of “Honest Labour” this week, and customers who placed a pre-publication order should receive their books soon. We received our first box of the books at the storefront yesterday. Our Michigan plant, as always, did a nice job with the printing and binding.
The act of unpacking a book that you worked on for years is always an odd experience. For me, it has offered more relief than joy. Relief that nothing went horribly wrong at the factory or during shipment. Relief that I didn’t misspell the title of the book on its spine (oh crap, I just had to check it again). Relief that I lived to see it.
That feeling fades after a couple days and is replaced with worry as I wonder: Will the readers like it? Or did we throw away months of (honest) labor and tens of thousands of dollars?
I guess we’ll find out.
Last night I took “Honest Labour” out for a practice run. After a long day at the bench I sat in our library with a beer, the book on my lap. I opened it to a random page and started reading at page 244.
“Money – has in fact, the most surprising limitations. Particularly in anything to do with craftsmanship….”
After an hour of reading, I had drained my glass and felt a lot better about the half-completed work on my benchtop, and the future of this book.
Also, this is important to know: Kara Gebhart Uhl and Megan Fitzpatrick did the lioness’ share of the work on this book. Kara selected the essays, typed them in using a variety of methods and proofed them. She also researched and wrote the 30 vignettes of each year’s news events (from 1936-1966) that begin each chapter. Megan designed most of the pages, a new role for her. Since becoming the editor of The Chronicle, Megan has taken a deeper interest in page design. This book was 474 pages of practice.
Our labor is, for the most part, done with this book. We are all now working on other titles. Your work – reading the essays and finding meaning in them – has just begun. We hope you enjoy it.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. If you would like to read some free excerpts from “Honest Labour,” you can find six of our favorite essays via these links:
The following is the introductory note to our new book “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years: 1936-1966.” This entry explains the history behind the project and the doubts that we battled throughout. I know that it is an odd book for us to publish, and I promise that our next titles will be filled with the nitty-gritty how-to information that will help you at the bench. This book, however, might just help you in other aspects of your life.
Our series of books called “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years” began with a big stack of books imported from the U.K., a box of magic markers and a few too many bottles of beer and wine.
(Actually, to be honest, “The Woodworker” books began as the germ of an idea after woodworker and toolmaker Don McConnell introduced me in the 1990s to Charles Hayward’s books published by Evans Bros.)
The idea was that we were going to cull the best woodworking articles from the period when Hayward worked at the magazine, 1936-1969. To do this, we had to comb through 360 issues of the magazine and flag the best articles (for scanning, then OCR, then image processing, then…).
So over a series of long evenings, Ty Black, Phil Hirz, Megan Fitzpatrick, John Hoffman and I sat at my dining table and did just that. I thought the process would be quick. It wasn’t. What slowed us was the content. After scanning an article and flagging it, we all became captivated by the quality of the articles themselves. These magazines were filled with pieces that you don’t find in modern magazines. And so we read the articles instead of simply moving on.
Our Indiana warehouse reports that our press run of “Honest Labour” has arrived. The warehouse will pack and ship the pre-publication orders shortly. You should receive an emailed notice when your book goes into the mail.
If you are unsure about purchasing this title (it’s a bit out of the norm) I would encourage you to read some of the free excerpts we have posted during the last six weeks. You can read them here, and they might help you make up your mind.
In the introduction to “Honest Labour,” I openly wonder if this book will sell, or if it will instead be the heaviest poster we’ve printed to date. I am happy to report that this book began to turn a profit sometime last week.
If you live outside the United States, the book will be available from Lee Valley (I do not know when). In the U.K. you can place a pre-publication order here through Classic Hand Tools.
Editor’s note: This is part of our series featuring some of our favorite columns from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward” years, along with a few sentences about why these particular columns hit the mark.
This column from 1942 speaks to the need to pass on our hard-earned skills, and as a teacher (and a member of the human race), that’s of utmost importance to me. What also strikes a chord is Hayward’s discussion in the opening paragraph of today’s work being divorced from creativity. While his “today” is more than half a century ago, I don’t think it’s changed much…except perhaps for the worse. I built a fair number of projects for Popular Woodworking (and for myself) before I became editor. After I was promoted, I spent all my time in meetings or at my desk. Editing involves some creativity – but it’s not the same as designing and building a tangible thing. And I missed sharing my own tangible work with others. I shouldn’t have let the long hours and employee reviews stop me.
Now, I’m happy to be back in the shop – and happier still when there are six to 10 others in there learning alongside me. But I think Hayward was wrong in saying kids today aren’t interested. Or maybe that was true in 1942. Now, almost every class I teach has “kids” in it. But the point is to teach – to pass it on. Woodworking is an art, but it shouldn’t be a mystery.
— Fitz
We have often discussed here that aspect of modern industrial life which has tended to divorce the work of many men from anything that is intelligently creative, because so much is done by machinery. Compensation comes in the increase of leisure which this allows, a leisure that does at least give a man an opportunity of finding his own interests or hobbies. But at the same time have come the counter-attractions of cinema and radio, offering an easy way of entertainment without effort to a man who is tired after his day’s work. So that, in spite of the increase of opportunity, he has every inducement to allow himself to drift. The older man usually knows how to strike the balance. Things were not so easy when he was a boy, he had to learn to amuse himself, and he grew up with all sorts of hobbies and enthusiasms, and learned to be a handy sort of fellow. If he is, say, a keen woodworker, or a keen gardener, there are times when nothing will tempt him away from the job in hand.
***
But for the younger generation it is different. They were born into the state of affairs where entertainment, like everything else, was made easy. And some of our Youth Leaders are now finding it difficult to get boys really doing things—boys in their teens with no particular hobbies, no particular interests, who simply want to be entertained, and that at a time when a boy should be so full of interests that no day is long enough to cram them all in. “I do not complain of growing old,” says John Buchan, “but I like to keep my faith that at one stage in our mortal existence nothing is impossible.” We feel that that should be so in youth, and yet here is the problem in our midst. “It gives you absolutely nothing to work on,” said one of their Leaders to me recently, a man who numbers photography, book-binding, carpentry and music among his own hobbies, and does them all extremely well. “They’ve no conception of taking the initiative themselves or doing a spot of work for the pleasure of it.”
***
What are we going to do about it? The gospel of “work for the pleasure of it” isn’t an easy gospel to preach to the young. You have got somehow to kindle the spark of enthusiasm in their minds first, that enthusiasm which can make everything seem well worth doing, even the hard bits, for the sake of the end in view. And it is the enthusiasm of the Youth Leaders from which the boys have got to catch their own tiny spark which, once alight, may well kindle into a flame. And it will be worth it. For they can learn more from intelligently working at a hobby than from almost anything else. It develops patience, ingenuity, alertness, self-mastery, helps them to discover their own hidden powers, teaches them the satisfaction of a good job done, widens their knowledge in a thoroughly practical way.
***
But we have no business to leave it all to the Youth Leaders. There is no easy time ahead for the boys of this generation and it is every man’s job to lend a hand where he can. The best place is in the home. If you are a keen woodworker, then try to interest your boy as well. Don’t just hustle him out of the way because you are in the middle of a job and don’t want to be interrupted, or are afraid he will meddle with your tools. Teach him how to use them; help him with some little constructive job of his own, if it is only to make a “safe”—as a small boy of my acquaintance did recently—to keep his secrets in! Small boys are usually keen enough. It is the older ones who grow apathetic. And who knows if the blame can be put entirely on the pictures? Mayn’t it be that we have hustled them out of our way rather too often? Dared them to touch our tools when they were simply longing to try them? The impulse to do and to make things is there right enough. But these are days when it needs to be fostered.
Our Indiana warehouse reports that our press run of “
Editor’s note: This is part of our series featuring some of our favorite columns from “