Category: Making Book

Before I talk to an author about writing a book for Lost Art Press, I ask them to perform a short exercise beforehand. The exercise helps me understand the real thrust of their book idea. 

This is important because we have received book proposals from authors that read “I’d like to write something about doors.”

Here is the exercise we send to potential authors:

1. Come up with a book title and (if necessary) a secondary title. Book titles should be short – usually no more than five words. And they must relate to the entire book. They should use simple and strong words – no -ing or -ly forms. We will help you with the final title, but it will help you think about your book if you can develop a working title. It helps set the tone for your work. A secondary title can help explain the main title. For example, the secondary title for “Cut & Dried” is “A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology.” You might need a secondary title. You might not. 
2. Write a “high concept.” The “high concept” is a 35-word (or so) pitch that explains the content of the book to someone who is not a woodworker and who has never heard of your work. I imagine it’s how I would explain a book at a dinner party to the person next to me. The “high concept” for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” was: “You can build almost anything with about 45 tools. This book shows you how to choose good tools, helps you build a chest to protect them and contends that furniture making is a radical act in today’s society.”
3. Create a table of contents (TOC). A good TOC is an outline for your book. It is the skeleton, and it charts your narrative arc (all good books tell a story). The more detail and thought you put into your TOC, the easier the writing will be. Also good to note: You might rip up a few TOCs before it’s over. 

When I start in on a book, I also perform this exercise. But with the vernacular chair book, I wasn’t ready to answer these questions. I had to first figure out if I had an idea that was worth working on for two years. 

So for the first half of 2020 I worked on other people’s books and “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” and I didn’t think much about chairs at all.

I did sign up a few new authors for future books, such as getting Megan Fitzpatrick to write a book on Dutch tool chests for a 2021 release. One day we talked about her upcoming book, and I asked how she planned to deal with the different possible construction strategies for the chest’s lid, back and interior.

She replied that she was going to use a “Choose Your Own Adventure” approach, where she would show all of the typical methods and let the reader pick.

And that was when my book on vernacular chairs snapped into focus.

Of all the books I’ve written, my favorites are the ones that I wish I’d had when I was 11 years old. If I’d had “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” or “The Anarchist’s Design Book” when I was a kid, I would have been thrilled.

When I first contracted the chair-building disease in the 1990s – after encountering John Brown’s writing – I bought every book I could find on chairs, even the crappy ones. I read them all once, and most of them twice.

They all left me disheartened. Here’s why: Each author explained how he built his chairs. But they were (mostly) from the tradition that involved green wood, a froe, a shavehorse, a drawknife, a steambox and a bunch of specialty tapering and reaming tools. 

Plus the geometry hurt my head.

I didn’t own any of those tools or easy access to green wood. After years of building furniture with dovetails, mortises and tenons, it seemed like few of my skills or tools carried over to chairmaking. That’s when I decided to take a class with David Fleming in Cobden, Ontario, to see if there was any hope for me as a chairmaker.

With Dave’s help I got through the construction of my first chair. Then I came home and – within days – began to build another chair so I wouldn’t forget what I’d learned. I decided that I would just use whatever wood and tools I had on hand and make it work. The chair would probably suck, fall apart or break. But that would be OK. It was just a flammable vessel to help me retain the geometry lessons and the hand skills.

The chair I made was damn ugly, but it didn’t fall apart.

After 20 years of studying vernacular chairs, I have concluded that “use what you have” is a valid way to make a good chair. It’s the strategy that’s been employed all over the world for centuries. You don’t need special tools or skills to make a chair. You just have to really want to build a dang chair.

Megan’s simple phrase, “Choose Your Own Adventure,” is the crux of my next book. 

The working title: “The Stick Chair Book.”

The high concept: “Build chairs with the wood and tools around you. Learn to make all the components of a chair – legs, stretchers, arms, sticks, crest – with a wide variety of materials, tools and methods. Then combine these parts however you like into a pleasing, comfortable and sturdy chair.”

That’s 46 words and a little long. Oh well.

Then I vomited out the book’s TOC in less than an hour. 

There are a dozen ways to make each chair component, from using a band saw down to a block plane. You don’t need riven wood. Straight grain is straight grain, no matter how you find it. You don’t need any special equipment to make a good chair. These disparate components can be combined in 1,000 ways to make 1,000 different chairs. And the geometry is easy once you realize that it’s the numbers and math that are holding you back.

I knew in a second that this book is something I’d gladly devote two years (or more) to. It’s the chair book I wish I’d owned in 1998.

— Christopher Schwarz

Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.

When I need to mentally travel from Point A to Point B, I sit down and think hard. I’ll draw it out on paper like this:

1. Steal the underpants. 2. Convert them to face masks. 3. Profit.

When I need to go from Point I’ll Never Have Another Good Idea to Point It’s 4 a.m. And I Can’t Stop Writing, the process is different. I suspect that I am involved somehow, but I don’t feel involved. I discovered years ago that my mind is more agile when it’s AWOL. 

This is true: If I deliberately attempt to think of a good idea for a book, I’ll fail (“Why not build little houses for snails?”). But if I drive alone to Minnesota and stare at the dotted lines for 10 hours, my brain makes connections among things I’ve both forgotten and remember sharply (“Duh, snails already have houses…”).

For this sort of work, the first hour or two of driving is worthless. Time is real and passes slowly. When I finally let that go, however, it’s like falling asleep, going into a trance or being hypnotized. I can drive for four hours and barely notice.

I use familiar music as the backdrop. Nothing challenging or new. If I really want to trance out, I put on Modest Mouse’s album “The Moon and Antarctica.” I once listened to that album four times in a row on a trip.

I can hear the “tsk tsks” from where you are sitting. Yet, I’ve never had a car wreck when I do this. My lizard-esque midbrain is still in control of the steering wheel and foot pedals. But the frontal lobe is lost. 

Oh, did I mention that I don’t do drugs (other than beer, and not while driving)?

So I’m in the car on a trip to Minnesota in November to talk to a woodworking guild there. I’m going to build a chair for an audience. It’s no big deal because I’ve built this chair 20 times. So instead I think about my earlier idea for a series of books on vernacular chairs – one book for each culture. 

Gawd, that was a wrong idea. But my mind drifts to what I like about these chairs. No ornament. You work with what you have. Simple joints. Few tools.

Soon I slip into a trance. I don’t remember what music was playing this time. I’m going to guess it was Harry Smith’s “American Anthology of Folk Music.” Every song in that collection is well worn like a river pebble for me. And some songs seem designed to induce a trance. Listen to “Present Joys” or “Rocky Road” by the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers five times in a row and tell me you haven’t seen the other side.

By the time I get to Minneapolis I have suffocated then squished my initial idea for the book. Oh look, I have arrived early. And I need new boots. So I try to shake off the drive, find a shoe store and spend some time thinking about footwear and pronation instead.

With the boot problem licked, I walk across the street to get some lunch, still in a bit of a fog from the road. Reluctantly, I order a beer with my porketta sandwich. I hate drinking in the middle of the day because I always feel like crap for hours after. But the restaurant has a beer I’ve always wanted to try.

As I chew, my brain offers up a book idea. The book is not about stick chairs and how they are different from culture to culture. Instead, it’s about stick chairs and how they are similar from culture to culture, century to century. It doesn’t matter if you’re British, German or Slavic. This tradition belongs to all of us. Call it “The Universal Book of Stick Chairs” maybe?

I finish the beer, and pay the bill. It was a tasty beer, but my body now has to pay the tab. I head to my hotel room and lie down. I curl up, fully clothed. 

This, I know, is the second paragraph of the story. It’s better than the first paragraph, but it’s missing something and is making excuses for the first paragraph. 

Lucky for me I can lose myself for the next two days in building a chair and answering questions about it from the audience. Then I have a long drive home to Kentucky. Maybe the answer will become clear then. 

It won’t.

— Christopher Schwarz

Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.

This is a woodworking blog, so I don’t write much about the stuff that consumes 49 percent of my waking hours, which is making books. That’s writing, photography, editing, image processing, page layout and the intricacies of book manufacturing.

Process, movement and materials have always fascinated me. And I have always loved factory tours because I am interested in how things are made, whether it’s a winding for a universal motor or a toothpick. 

So when I started working on a new book, I decided to document the process for people who are interested in how our books get made. There is some risk. It might bore you. It might convince you that what we do is so easy that you should start a competing publishing company and put us out of business. Or you might conclude you’re buying books from a remarkably furry wackjob.

I have a couple requests when it comes to this series. Please don’t be offended if I don’t reply to your comment or take your advice about the content of this book. I already don’t have enough time to reply to every message sent my way. And I receive so much unsolicited advice, criticism and “youshoulds” that it’s almost like I’m a woman on the Internet. 

So let’s rewind the tape to October 2019 when I decided to write this book. A few blog entries should catch us up to where I am today: actively building and photographing.

The Germ 

Two things to know about my book ideas. One, I usually can remember the exact moment the idea came to me. “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” came to me while on a long run in Maine; “Campaign Furniture” began in a now-defunct antiques store in Charleston, S.C. 

And two, none of my books have ended up like I first envisioned them.

This new book started out when I was browsing a book of Danish vernacular furniture in our library titled “Danske Bondemøbler” by Axel Steensberg. Suzanne Ellison had either sent the book to me or recommended it. In any case, I turned to the section on chairs and was fascinated by how the forms were so familiar and yet still foreign. 

I put the book down and searched for folk chairs on the Internet from countries other than the U.K. and Ireland. Were basic stick chairs a significant part of other cultures? Of course, the answer is yes. Driving sticks into a plank to make a seat is a fundamental construction that appears almost anywhere you have sticks and planks.

My first idea was to publish a series of books, one for each culture. The books would be the same size and approach that John Brown took in “Welsh Stick Chairs.” First explain the history of the chair as it relates to the culture. Explore the different chair forms and their defining characteristics. Then show how to build a representative example.

Perhaps, I thought, I could publish one of these books per year. All with different-colored covers. Keep going until I run out of cultures or energy.

When I was at journalism school, one of the lessons I learned is that the first paragraph you write to a story usually sucks. And the second paragraph is usually trying to obscure the flaws of the first paragraph. The third paragraph is usually the true beginning to your story. Jettison the first two grafs. Don’t try to fix them. 

The same goes with book ideas. I knew within minutes that this idea was a non-starter. A Dane should write a book on Danish chairs. A Swede should write a book on Swedish chairs. I was not the right person to do a series of books on cultures that I knew only from books and as a tourist.

But I also knew that there was something to my idea that I could use. But I didn’t know what it was just yet. 

For me, the solution to this problem is to take long walks or even longer drives in the car. 

— Christopher Schwarz

Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.