Category: Make a Chair from a Tree

I am pleased to announce that “Make a Chair from a Tree – Third Edition” by Jennie Alexander is now available for purchase and is shipping immediately from our Indianapolis warehouse. The book is $37 plus shipping. 

If you purchase the book before July 21, 2021, you will receive a free pdf of the book at checkout. After July 21, buying the book plus the pdf will cost $46.25.

The third edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree” is completely new. The text was rewritten by Jennie Alexander with the help of Larry Barrett before her death in 2018. Peter Follansbee then helped polish the text, photos and images. Many other people around the country contributed to the effort to bring this book back into print. Why go to so much trouble?

In 1978, the first edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree” kicked off an enormous surge of interest in green woodworking and chairmaking. Since that time, Jennie continued to refine the design of the chair shown in the book plus the processes to make it (steambending wasn’t covered in the first edition).

We hope that this all-new edition will inspire other woodworkers to pick up the craft and build this beautiful, lightweight and incredibly comfortable chair.

The new edition is the same quirky 9” x 9” trim size. But the manufacturing similarities end there. The new edition is full-color with sewn signatures and is hardbound. 

We hope that many of our retailers will carry this title, but that is their decision, not ours. So a note to your favorite retailer might encourage them to carry the title.

— Christopher Schwarz

William Shakespeare is credited with the invention of 1,700 words (or at least his plays are the first known printed use thereof). Jennie Alexander can be credited with just a few less – and we even left some of them in the third edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree” (if their meanings could be easily gleaned from context). Below are just a handful of the interesting neologisms she coined and a few actual (but rarely used) words and phrases she uttered (and wrote) on a regular basis. Who knows? Maybe in 450 years, everyone will be saying “dingus” instead of “fixture.”

Baby Jerome (n.) Someone who crawls under the furniture (to look at joinery).

clacker (n.) A depth stop made from a chopstick that attaches to a drill bit shaft. It clacks when it hits the work.

clean-out chisel (n.) A chisel with a curve or angle at the bottom for cleaning out a mortise (like a gooseneck chisel, but shop-made).

dingus (n.). Any shop-made jig that gets used over and again. For example, the IYFLL (see below) is a dingus.

dotter (n). A thin stick with screws through it, used to simultaneously mark all mortise locations (or mark whatever you’ve laid out with said screws). Conscripted from the turning world.

furshlugginer (adj.) A piece of junk.

GABG (n.) The Glowing Acrylic Bevel Gauge. A dingus made from green acrylic. Used in sighting legs to the proper angle.

gixerdee (adj.) Something that’s out of truth – synonym for cattywampus (which she used interchangeably with gixerdee).

Goldilocksing (adj.), Choosing the best compromise between alternatives, such as the size of a rung mortise.

IYFLL (n). In Your Face Line Level. A dingus that hooks onto a drill-bit extender to help you keep the bit level.

knocker-docker (n.) a wooden mallet.

Miss Moist-Bone Dry (n.) One of many Jennie’s many pseudonyms.

Mouldy figs (n.) People who listen to early Jazz; Jennie (who was a jazz musician) appropriated it as a term for hand-tool purists.

ovality (n.) The quality of being oval.

spruck (n.) The sound a piercer or spoon bit makes while tearing up the wood fibers as it makes its way around a hole.

truncadon (n.) The remainder of a billet after the sapwood and bark has been rived from it – i.e. it has been truncated into its useful wood.

toothy critters (n.) A metal planing stop with sharp teeth.

— Fitz

p.s. Anyone who spent time with Jennie has more to add – above are the just the words/phrases that Larry Barrett, Peter Follansbee, Christopher Schwarz and I could jot down off the top of our heads. So if you have others, please add them in the comments!

When I drove away from Jennie Alexander’s Baltimore home in 2014, I had her somewhat-reluctant agreement that together we would publish “Make a Chair From a Tree, Third Edition.”

Her reluctance wasn’t due to a lack of passion for the book’s subject – the simple but gorgeous object that we now call a Jennie Chair had been an obsession of hers for decades.

Instead, she didn’t know if she was physically and mentally up to the task. You see, she didn’t want to simply revise the two previous editions of this book. She had learned too much since they were published. She wanted to start from scratch.

So I enlisted Larry Barrett, a chairmaking student of Jennie’s, to help her write and re-write the text. And I can honestly say that if it weren’t for Larry, the book you are holding would never have existed. For four years, he patiently helped Jennie explore her chairmaking process in almost-molecular detail.

When Jennie died in July of 2018, I wondered if the book was going to the grave with her. We didn’t have a finished manuscript. We didn’t have step photos or even a plan for illustrations.

But what we had was a long list of people who had been touched deeply by Jennie and her work and who volunteered to throw themselves at this project.

Larry polished the latest version of the manuscript. One of Jennie’s daughters, Harper Burke, arranged for us to build a Jennie chair and photograph the process in Jennie’s Baltimore workshop. Brendan Gaffney dropped everything to help with photos and illustrations. Nathaniel Krause, one of Jennie’s students, wove the hickory seat for the book.

And Peter Follansbee, one of Jennie’s most devoted students, volunteered to edit the whole thing into this intensely technical (but easy to understand) and personal (but not maudlin) document.

Suddenly, all the barriers to the publication of this book were swept away. Tom McKenna at Taunton Press graciously allowed us to use drawings from the first edition. Anatol Polillo made any copyright problems disappear.

Basically, we got anything we needed to ensure “Make a Chair From a Tree, Third Edition” made it to press. There’s no room to list everyone who helped. You know who you are. Thank you.

I sometimes wonder what Jennie would think of the finished third edition. I know she’d be delighted by the contributions from the people she taught and who, in turn, inspired her.

But I also know that she’d say the book isn’t finished. There are still some loose strings, especially in the section on “bound water.” And perhaps we should just start again at the beginning….

Thank you Jennie, but the burden of refining your gorgeous chair and its elegant construction process is now firmly on our shoulders.

Off to Press

This week we sent “Make a Chair from a Tree: Third Edition” to press. With any luck, the finished result will be in our hands in late June or July. When it arrives, we will begin selling it immediately. We will sell both a hardbound edition and a pdf version. For the first 30 days, customers who buy the hardback book from us will also receive the pdf for free at checkout (sorry, this offer is not available to people who buy the book from our retailers). The book will be $37 plus domestic shipping.

Like all Lost Art Press books, “Make a Chair from a Tree: Third Edition” is produced and printed in the United States. The book is 184 pages and measures 9″ square – the original trim size of the 1978 edition. Unlike the original edition, our version is in full color and the book is hardback.

Except for a few drawings, the book is completely revised and almost 60 pages longer.

As always, I don’t have any information on which of our retailers will carry the book. We hope that all of them will, but it is entirely their decision. The best way to find out is to ask the retailer directly.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. If you can’t wait, we recommend you check out the “Make a Chair from a Tree” video from 1999.