I love black walnut (Juglans nigra), but walnut does not love us.
Sure, we all know that walnut is bad for horses – stables will not accept the shavings for bedding. Plus, walnut sawdust is not so good for mulch or bedding for plants.
It can be used with malice. I know a furniture maker who makes cooking spoons with walnut for customers – a gift! – who have been extreme pains in his tukus. Walnut can have laxative properties when it comes in contact with food.
Me, I dislike walnut from the inside. My insides.
Some time during the summer I got some nasty walnut splinters in my left hand. I don’t remember the trauma, but the surgeon had the proof. The walnut got under my skin and a bunch of scar tissue formed around the fragments.
A hand surgeon took out the splinters and scar tissue on Wednesday. Now I have to learn to cut dovetails with a massive splint and bandage around my finger. Stupid walnut.
If you want to make good money writing woodworking books, you don’t need a lot of skills, tools or primo wood. You don’t need to know a lot of joinery or be a particularly good finisher. You don’t even really need a workshop.
During my 14 years at F+W Publications, I did a long stint as a contributing editor to the now-dead Woodworkers Book Club. As part of the job I had to read about 70 woodworking books every year and review them for the club’s bulletin. And I learned an awful lot about what makes a woodworking book sell by poring over the monthly financials.
Beautiful furniture projects do not sell. Books on building your skills don’t sell much. Books about wood and its properties – no sale. Books on hand work? Nope.
The woodworking books that make real money are birdhouse books. They outsell other kinds of woodworking books about three-to-one.
While this surprised me at first, it makes a lot of sense. Birdhouse books appeal to the non-woodworker, the dead-nuts beginner, the Boy Scout troop leader and the birder, to name a few. And they appeal to me as well.
I’ve seen a lot of crazy birdhouse books. Sure, there are lots of books out there that try to build houses actually intended for birds that pay attention to wood selection, house placement, opening size, etc. And then there are the ones that look like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater or a giant uterus.
I’ve always wanted to write a birdhouse book – one of the crazy ones, of course. My first inclination was to build birdhouses while channeling a famous furniture-maker:
“James Krenov Crafts Houses for Birds” – All the birdhouses would be chests on a stand, have gorgeous dovetails and be made from olive wood. And they would be too nice to put outside.
“G%$#@& Birdhouses by Gary Knox Bennett” – All the birdhouses would be covered in bent nails and roach clips.
“Sam Maloof, Birdhouse Builder” – All the birdhouses would be rocking chairs.
And so on.
Well one night my wife, Lucy, and I had a little too much wine to drink at dinner and we started brainstorming ideas for the most ridiculous birdhouse book we could think of.
The title: Killer Birdhouses The concept: Birdhouses made to look like things that normally kill birds. The projects: Birdhouses in the shape of a…
Blender
Frying pan
Sliding-glass Door
Oscillating Table Fan
Cat Mouth
Shotgun
Jet Engine
Stump and a Hatchet
Worms with a Cannon (my favorite!)
ICBM
Oven
Bucket of KFC Chicken
That reminds me, I need to get Lucy a fresh box of wine. We need to come up with some more book ideas.
Sometimes looks can be deceiving. Megan Fitzpatrick, the managing editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine, says she’s a 14-year-old boy trapped in the body of a 43-year-old-woman.
Wait, I shouldn’t tell that story.
Sometimes looks can be deceiving. To the outside world, Megan sometimes looks like the “I Can Do That” spokeswoman. It’s true that she’s probably built more “I Can Do That” projects than anyone. But that’s not because those are the only things she can build.
Close observers of the magazine know that she has built some big case pieces with lots of hand-cut dovetails, cove moulding and inset doors and drawers. But only the people who work with her know the whole story.
Megan is one of the more ambitious woodworkers I know. She always picks projects above her skill level in some way and then pesters seeks out the knowledge to build them. That’s how she learned dovetailing, inlay, sharpening, you name it.
While that might not sound so unusual, she also is ruthless persistent about learning everything about a topic. When she wanted to learn dovetails, I think she asked everyone in the office at Popular Woodworking Magazine to teach her separately. Then she’d compare the techniques and forge her own path.
In December, Megan decided to build a spice box with line-and-berry inlay as a gift for her mother. You can read the harrowing tale here. Bottom line: I hope Megan will be able to show off more of her highbrow skills – other than iambic pentameter – in the coming years.
It’s easy in this male-dominated business for some people to see women in the craft as window dressing, as has been the case on certain home-improvement television shows (I’m looking at you, Dean). Don’t buy into that with Megan, or you are liable to get a roundhouse kick in the ear.
The shows from the latest season of Roy Underhill’s “The Woodwright’s Shop” can now be viewed online for free through this link.
What, you are still here and reading my crap? Click the link and get over there and watch all 13 episodes. That’s more than six hours of Roy, with less than an hour of my drivel on planes and the Anarchist’s Square. Plus great episodes with Peter Follansbee, Bill Anderson, Peter Ross and Steve Latta. And five glorious minutes with Megan “Chopped Liver” Fitzpatrick.
I mean, like, so what the heck? There’s nothing to see here. Would it chase you away faster if I talked about the weather? Maybe if I posted another stupid quotation? It’s Roy for gosh durn sake. Click here.
Oh I give up.
— Christopher Schwarz
By the way, the description of the show on planing is so ridiculously wrong it makes me wee my wee panties. The real name of the show is: “The 12-step Program to Break Your Addiction to Smoothing Planes.”
I don’t collect tools, books or even Hummels (he said, throwing up a little in his mouth).
Instead, I like to collect clarity.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always gathered little scraps of paper filled with notes jotted down from the books I’ve read, the lectures I’ve attended and the friends I’ve had beers with. I am a great admirer of people who can frame their ideas in a compelling way using as few words as possible – even if I vehemently disagree with them.
I turn these phrases over and over in my mind, like a fine object. I examine the workmanship, look for flaws and study the social context in which they were made. I also like to place these them against other ideas to see if new meaning emerges.
And that is why I post these quotations on the Lost Art Press blog and pair them with images. I don’t mean to confuse or upset. And I don’t use them to indicate my own personal thought processes, mood or aura (I’m trending orange this morning, by the way).
Instead, the blog is a way to record these quotations (I sometimes lose my scraps of paper), and the response from others is always interesting.
So about that Elbert Hubbard quote on obedience. Here’s why I posted it with that image.
1. This is from Elbert Hubbard, the guy who wrote “Jesus was an Anarchist” (1910), a spiritual founder of the American Arts & Crafts movement, a book maker and a soap salesman. Was the guy a genius? A sellout? How does that quotation square with what I know about Hubbard’s philosophy? Does his “Message to Garcia” tick you off or make you nod your head in agreement?
2. Hubbard founded the Roycrofters, an organization of craftsmen who specialized in making all sorts of beautiful handmade and sometimes eccentric objects. Like many Arts & Crafts proponents, the idea was to mimic the medieval guilds.
3. Which takes us to the image, which is from “Die Hausbücher der Nürnberger Zwölfbrüderstiftungen,” naturally. It’s a collection of images of craftsmen from many trades that began in 1388. I’ll let you run the web pages through Google Translate yourself, but these books were created for an interesting reason — they were part of a retirement home for impoverished craftsmen.
So for me, this image and this quotation make me think about the meaning of obedience as it relates to craft, especially now that I am out of a job.
So there you have it. I don’t mean to be opaque, but I also don’t teach people how to cut dovetails by going over to their house and building them a dovetailed tool chest.
